Sunday, April 30, 2006

American Airlines Could Have Saved That Flight; Instead They Tried to Keep the Hijackings Secret [excerpt] 

So in those terrifying minutes before the first hit, two brave women on the phone inside Flight 11 were calmly telling American Airlines ground officials exactly what was happening.

The airline’s reaction: Nothing. It did absolutely nothing.

The managers could have picked up a phone and told all their pilots what was going on. They could have called officials in New York. There is a real likelihood people at least could have evacuated the second tower.

If someone on the ground had acted, Flight 93, sitting on the Newark airport tarmac, might well have avoided the hijack.

Flight 93 took off at 8:42 that morning, a few minutes before the Flight 11 struck the WTC. It was not hijacked until 9:28. It is simple fact that the FAA, American Airlines and the military knew about the 911 hijacking before Flight 93 took off. Before its cockpit was seized two planes had hit the World Trade Center.

The 911 Commission report states it clearly: “As news of the hijackings filtered through the FAA and the airlines, it does not seem to have occurred to their leadership that they needed to alert other aircraft in the air that they too might be at risk.’’

The 911 Commission found ``no evidence…that American Airlines ever sent any cockpit warnings to its aircraft on 911.’’ United’s first decisive move to inform its pilots occurred at 9:19 when a United Flight dispatcher, on his own initiative, notified the airline’s intercontinental flights: “Beware any cockpit intrusion. Two a/c [aircraft] hit World Trade Center.’’

Flight 93 got this warning at 9:24. Two minutes later the pilot responded and asked for confirmation. And two minutes later flight controllers in Cleveland heard shouts from the cockpit: “Hey get out of here ... get out of here ... get out of here.’’

The pilot had heard the warning, but had not had time to react. - JAMES RIDGEWAY, author of ``Five Unanswered Questions about 911.’’ Seven Stories Press. (via Information Clearing house)
Update on May 9: P. Barnholdt, Customer Relations American Airlines answered my email about the above event only by declaring that there are (I'm paraphrasing) "deliberate company procedures in place which fully comply with FAA regulations."

posted by George Thomas Kysor 6:38 PM

'unknown Americans' are provoking civil war in Iraq [excerpt] 

The Americans, my interlocutor suspected, are trying to provoke an Iraqi civil war so that Sunni Muslim insurgents spend their energies killing their Shia co-religionists rather than soldiers of the Western occupation forces. "I swear to you that we have very good information," my source says, finger stabbing the air in front of him. "One young Iraqi man told us that he was trained by the Americans as a policeman in Baghdad and he spent 70 per cent of his time learning to drive and 30 per cent in weapons training. They said to him: 'Come back in a week.' When he went back, they gave him a mobile phone and told him to drive into a crowded area near a mosque and phone them. He waited in the car but couldn't get the right mobile signal. So he got out of the car to where he received a better signal. Then his car blew up." - Robert Fisk © 2006 Independent News and Media Limited [See the Fair Use Notice, below.]

posted by George Thomas Kysor 6:12 PM

Saturday, April 29, 2006

Times Are Hard: On the Causes of the Business Cycle [excerpt] 

(This article is excerpted from chapter 13 of Mr. Callahan's book, Economics for Real People, available at Shop Mises)

In the economies of most modern industrial nations, a central bank manages the nation's money supply and attempts to control the level of interest rates, at least to some extent. (In the United States, that central bank is called the Federal Reserve. Since it is the most powerful and famous central bank in the world, we will focus our discussion on "the Fed.") Various rationales have been put forward for central bank interference in the market: to supply sufficient currency and credit to "meet the needs of commerce," to ensure a "stable value" for the currency, to "fight inflation," to smooth out fluctuations in the economy, and so on.

In light of our discussion of money and credit so far, those reasons are suspicious. We have seen that prices can adjust to whatever amount of currency is in the economy. Certainly, the adjustment process takes time and has associated costs. Therefore, we'd prefer gradual to rapid change, giving us more time to adjust. The need to dig up gold from the ground in order to create money acted as a regulator on the growth of the money supply during the period of the gold standard. That regulator led to a century-long period of remarkably low volatility in prices. Being able to create new money almost at will, as central banks can, obviously makes it easier to create rapid changes in the money supply. The various hyperinflations that have occurred in the last century, under fiat money regimes, attest to that fact.

Similarly, we have every reason to believe that the best mechanism for matching the businesses' perceived credit needs with the available savings is the interest rate market. What really matters to a business is that it can acquire the goods, the knowledge, and the services it needs to complete its plans during their progress toward producing consumer goods. The cash a business borrows is important only as a means to help acquire those factors of production. If the real factors are not available, because people have not saved a sufficient amount out of current and past production to bring them into existence, then neither increasing the amount of dollars in circulation nor artificially lowering the interest rate will magically bring them forth from the void.

And we have already covered the reason that the search for a stable currency is hopeless: valuation is an aspect of human action, and there are no constant numerical values in human action. Every freely chosen value implies the possibility of a change in valuation. And, far from fighting inflation, the Fed is the main cause of it.

In this chapter, we will examine the final reason listed above, "smoothing out fluctuations in the economy," in some depth. Over the course of the chapter we will see that the central bank tends to be the creator, and not the dissipater, of economic fluctuations. When it is putting on the brakes and deflating a bubble, it was usually the one that inflated the bubble in the first place.

Out of Gas

Image that you are a bus driver, at the edge of a desert, about to take a busload of passengers across it. You have left all gas stations behind. Your destination is a town on the other side of the wasteland before you. You are faced with a trade-off: the faster you try to reach the town, the less the passengers can use the air-conditioning to alleviate the desert heat. Both higher speeds and higher air-conditioning settings will use up the gas more quickly. And since, in our luxurious bus, each passenger has his own temperature control for his seat, you, the driver, cannot control the total amount of air conditioning used on the trip.

In order to make your decision, you look at your fuel gauge and determine how much gas you have. You tell the passengers that they must now make a trade-off between comfort on the way and speed traveled, as the more air-conditioning they choose to use, the faster the bus will consume fuel. Then you collect statements from the passengers on what temperature they will keep their seat. You perform some calculations on mileage, speed, and fuel consumption, and pick the fastest speed at which you can travel, given the amount of gas you have and the passengers' statements about their use of the air-conditioning.

The passengers had to decide whether to cross the desert in greater comfort but arrive later at their final destination, or in less comfort but with an earlier arrival. The science of economics has little to say about the combination that they picked, other than that it seemed preferable to them at that moment of choice.

However, also imagine that, before you began your calculations, someone had sneaked up to the bus and replaced the passengers' real choices with a fake set that chose a higher temperature, in other words, one that makes it seem they will use less fuel than they really will. You will make your choice on travel speed as if the passengers will tolerate an average temperature of, say, 80 degrees, whereas in reality they will demand to have the bus cooled to an average of 70 degrees.

Obviously, your calculations will prove to be incorrect, and the trip will not come out as you had planned. The trip will begin with you driving as if you have more resources available than you really do. It will end with you phoning for help, when the sputtering of your engine reveals the deception.

I offer the above as a metaphor for the Austrian business cycle theory (ABCT), which explains why most modern economies tend to swing through boom times and recessions. You, the driver, represent the entrepreneurs. The gas is the sum of the resources available in the economy. The trip across the desert is some period of production. The passengers represent the consumers. Their choice on how much to use the air conditioning is analogous to how much consumers want to consume now at the expense of saving for the future (i.e., their time preference). The speed of the bus is the amount of investment spending the entrepreneurs will undertake. The ultimate destination is the satisfaction of as many of the consumers' wishes as possible. And it is the central bank ? for instance, the Federal Reserve ? that has sneaked up and tampered with the consumers' choices.

What the central bank tampers with is the market's reading of the consumers' average time preference, which is the rate of originary interest. Consumers' time preferences tell us how much capital will become available through consumer saving, or, in our metaphor, through cutting back on the air-conditioning.

When the central bank artificially lowers the rate of interest ? we hear on the news that the Fed has cut rates to "stimulate the economy" ? entrepreneurs make their plans as if consumers were willing to delay consumption and save more than they really are. As the bus driver, you act as if the passengers are willing to endure the heat enough for you to drive 70 miles per hour. In reality, they will force the bus to consume gas so rapidly that you should have planned to drive only 55. Your attempt to cross the desert will fail, leaving you out of gas.

Of course, the real economy does not simply come to a halt. At some point in the trip, it becomes apparent that the bus is using fuel too rapidly. The Fed, expressing a concern about "overheating," will raise rates. The entrepreneurs will slow way down so that the bus does not simply die ? they lay off employees, cancel investment projects, and reduce spending in other ways. The economy, after the boom at the start of the trip, has fallen into a recession.[1]

Our metaphor also allows us to differentiate between a "soft landing," a "hard landing," and a full crash. The further the bus has gone before the discrepancy between the market interest rate and consumers' real time preference is accounted for, the "harder" a landing the economy will undergo. If the entrepreneurs discover the error early (or the central bank cuts short the expansion quickly), the bus may only have to slow to 50 miles per hour to complete the trip. If the credit expansion is continued for a long time the bus may wind up having to coast down hills with the engine off ? and we have a fullscale depression, or crash.

As we saw in earlier chapters, interest rates reflect consumers' time preference because it is what borrowers must pay lenders, in order to persuade the lenders to delay their own consumption. If I have $100, I could spend it today on a nice dinner with my wife. Or, I could lend it out for a year, at the end of which I could spend it on a somewhat nicer dinner.

Exactly how much nicer a dinner I must expect to receive before I will lend the money is an expression of my preference for current consumption over future consumption. If I demand a rate of interest of at least 5%, that means that a $105 dinner next year is marginally more valuable to me than a $100 dinner this year. On the other hand, if my friend Rob demands 10-percent interest, he is demanding a $110 dinner. He values current consumption compared to future consumption more highly than I do.

The net result of all lenders and borrowers expressing their time preference by offering and bidding on loans is the market rate of interest. In any real interest-rate market, that rate will include, besides originary interest, added interest to account for inflation (or subtracted interest to account for deflation), as well as a risk premium to account for the chance that the venture or person that the money has been lent to will go belly-up.

The rate of interest tells entrepreneurs whether a particular investment is worth making or not. In an unhampered market, without inflation or deflation, that rate would be approximately equivalent to what is termed, in finance, the risk-free rate of interest. Since entrepreneurs can earn that return on their money simply by buying high-grade bonds, they will not undertake capital projects if they estimate that their return will be lower than the risk-free rate of interest. In terms of our analogy, it makes no sense to plan to travel 70 miles per hour on our trip if the consumers are only willing to turn off the AC (put off current consumption) enough for us to travel 55 miles per hour. For any project that returns less than the riskfree rate of interest, the consumers are indicating that they would, in fact, prefer that the resources necessary be used for current consumption rather than being invested in that project.

The Fed Starts A Party [2]

Let's look briefly at the recent Internet boom-and-bust as an example of using the Austrian theory to explain an episode in economic history.

It's been said that the Fed's job is to take away the punch bowl once the party gets going. The aphorism doesn't mention that it was usually the Fed that had filled it in the first place. ABCT has sometimes derisively been referred to as a "hangover theory." In fact, the metaphor is fairly apt. The Fed gets the party ginned up on cheap credit, then has to cut everyone off before disaster strikes.

MZM (money of zero maturity, one of a number of money supply measures) increased at a rate of less than 2.5% between 1993 and 1995. But over the next three years it shot up at an annualized rate of over 10%, rising during the last half of 1998 at a binge rate of almost 15%.

Sean Corrigan, a principal in Capital Insight, a British-based financial consultancy, details in "Norman, Strong, and Greenspan," the consequences of the expansion that came in

autumn 1998, when the world economy, still racked by the problems of the Asian credit bust over the preceding year, then had to cope with the Russian default and the implosion of the mighty Long-Term Capital Management.

Corrigan continues:

Over the next eighteen months, the Fed added $55 billion to its portfolio of Treasuries and swelled repos held from $6.5 billion to $22 billion?. [T]his translated into a combined money market mutual fund and commercial bank asset increase of $870 billion to the market peak, of $1.2 trillion to the industrial production peak, and of $1.8 trillion to date [August 2001] ? twice the level of real GDP added in the same interval.

The party was in full swing. The Fed had kept the good times rolling by cutting the federal funds rate a whole percentage point between June 1998 and January 1999. The rate on 30-year Treasuries dropped from a high of over 7% to a low of 5%.

Stock markets soared. The NASDAQ composite went from just over 1,000 to over 5,000 between 1996 and 2000, rising over 80% in 1999 alone. With abundant credit being freely served to Internet start-ups, hordes of corporate managers, who had seemed married to their stodgy blue-chip companies, suddenly were romancing some sexy dot-coms that had just joined the party.

Meanwhile consumer spending stayed strong ? with very low (sometimes negative) savings rates. Growth was not being fueled by real investment, which would require the putting aside of current consumption to save for the future, but by the monetary printing press.

Buoyed by the stellar stock market returns, consumers built massive additions to their houses and took trips they otherwise would not have taken. Real estate, especially in the "dotcom areas" such as Silicon Valley, soared in price.

As so often happens at bacchanalia, when the party entered the wee hours, it became apparent that too many guys had planned on taking the same girl home. There were too few resources available for all of their plans to succeed.

The most crucial ? and most general ? unavailable factor was a continuing flow of investment funds. (Of course, a continual supply of such funds by the Fed would only extend the boom and worsen the ensuing crash.) There also turned out to be shortages of programmers, network engineers, technical managers, and other factors of production. Internet startups, which had planned to operate at a loss for years by raising capital, found that not only was there less investment money available than they had hoped, but the cost of staying in business had gone up as well!

The business plans for many of the start-ups involved negative cash flows for the first ten or fifteen years, while they "built market share." To keep the atmosphere festive, they needed the host to keep filling the punch bowl.

However, the Fed knows that such a boom cannot be sustained indefinitely without eventual price inflation. Ultimately, if credit expansion continues, it will lead to the crack-up boom, where the economy enters into a period of runaway inflation. Fears of inflation led to Federal Reserve tightening in late 1999, which helped bring MZM growth back into the single digits (8.5% for the 1999?2000 period). As the punch bowl emptied, the hangover ? and the dot-com bloodbath ? began. According to research from Webmergers.com, at least 582 Internet companies closed their doors between May 2000 and July of 2001. The plunge in share price of many of those that remained alive was gut wrenching. For example, shares of Beyond.com, split adjusted, went from $619 to 79?. The NASDAQ retraced two years of gains in a little over a year. Unemployment shot upward, and the economy slipped into a recession.

In the fall of 2001, Enron exploded in the largest corporate bankruptcy in US history. It appears, at the time of writing, that some at Enron were at least morally and perhaps criminally culpable in the meltdown. But Enron's rise took place during a period of free-flowing credit, and it crashed once the last call was made. Ponzi schemes, too, thrive when credit is easy.

Another prominent explanation for booms and busts, one that has been applied to the Internet craze, might be called "mania theory." Investors become entranced by some particular investment ? tulip bulbs, French colonial trading ventures, Florida real estate, the "nifty fifty" stocks, or Internet companies ? and begin a self-perpetuating process of bidding more for the asset, seeing its price rise, bidding even more, and so on. Like a manic-depressive who can only maintain his manic phase so long before crashing, eventually people begin to have doubts about the mania, and it all blows up.

Commenting on the psychology of the theory is beyond the scope of this book. Nevertheless, we can say that there is nothing in the mania theory that contradicts the Austrian account. They look at the same phenomenon from the vantage point of two different sciences: social psychology and economics.

They may, in fact, prove to be complementary. The Austrian theory offers a coherent explanation of the onset of the mania ? a credit expansion ? and the onset of the depression ? the cessation of the expansion. After all, the mere fact that people are excited about the Internet cannot create a speculative bubble by itself. The funds to speculate with must come from somewhere, and the Austrian theory identifies just where. On the other hand, the mania theory might help explain the reason that booms often do seem to be channeled into certain faddish investments. - Gene Callahan

[1] For those familiar with mainstream macroeconomics, Roger Garrison's way of putting this may be helpful. In his book on Austrian macroeconomics, Time and Money, he says that the economy had been pushed beyond its production possibilities frontier, or PPF, during the boom, and falls back inside the PPF during the bust.

[2] Parts of the "The Fed Starts a Party" were co-written with Roger Garrison, and first appeared in our article, "A Classic Hayekian Hangover," in the January 2002 edition of Ideas on Liberty.

posted by George Thomas Kysor 8:57 AM

Friday, April 28, 2006

Sunni interviews Jim Bovard 

Sunni: Hi Jim! Thanks so much for taking some time to talk with me today. How are things there near the belly of the beast?

Jim: The chatter about impeachment is rising, so it ain't all bad.

Sunni: That is a welcome sound indeed. How are you doing? You got enough beer to keep your whistle wet throughout our conversation? [laughs]

Jim: Am I allowed to drink during the interview? Well, that changes everything.

Sunni: [laughs] As if I could, or would even want to stop you! You know, I'd've thought you'd be a whiskey or scotch drinker ... not sure why, now that I think about it. I like a few good brands of beer but have started to lean more toward bourbon, myself.

Jim: Where I was raised in the mountains of Virginia, beer and wine were what high school kids drank. I reckon there are pluses and minuses to preferring beer to harder stuff. On the flip side, it is rare to see anyone with a "whiskey belly".

Sunni: [laughs] Probably because drinking enough to cause one would kill you first! So, Jim, I think pretty much anyone in this country who's pro-freedom has at least heard of you or one of your books. How did you come to be pro-freedom?

Jim: I started to become politically aware at a time when government lies and abuses were roiling the nation and the world. I was in high school as the Vietnam War was coming to an end—and this was the same time that Nixon imposed wage and price controls which profoundly disrupted the economy. Inflation was roaring along, and some of the free market economists I had read explained how this was a government con. In high school, I worked one summer on the State Highway Department. Being a flag man was a hoot, especially when drivers would toss me free beers. Working alongside convicts in a road gang, I heard some stories about dishonest government prosecutions that awoke my interest in the criminal justice system. And the convicts stressed that the best illicit drugs they ever had were in prison, which fed my contempt for the war on drugs. The guard with the shaved head and four-keg beer belly which he rested his shotgun on did nothing to boost my respect for the state. My favorite part of that job was working with a chainsaw—an experience that proved invaluable for my future work as a journalist. It was much more inspirational than baling hay or fighting snakes in trees while picking peaches, as I did the prior two summers thanks in part to federal restrictions banning me from other work.

Roaming in the East Bloc in the mid-1980s gave me a stronger sense of the evil of tyranny. The gaunt faces and pervasive paranoia in Bucharest vivified the barbarity of Ceausescu—a political vampire who drained the nation's blood. Being interrogated for hours by the East German military police at the Czech-East German border was good preparation for dealing with the T.S.A. Assuming that all my phone calls were tapped was good training for living in post-Constitutional America. Seeing the fraud of the "mixed economy miracle" in Hungary fueled my contempt both for communists and for American intellectuals who were chirping that the Hungarians had discovered a third way between communism and capitalism. Many of the public intellectuals either did not recognize or did not give a damn about freedom then, and plenty of them don't give a damn now.

Sunni: Wow, Jim. I had no idea you had that kind of history. Did you intend to turn your political beliefs into an essential part of your livelihood? Or did you start out wanting to do something besides writing?

Jim: I started out as a finance major in college but quickly decided I wanted to be a writer. I was initially interested more in philosophy than in politics, as far as what I wanted to write about.

Sunni: What was your first paid writing gig?

Jim: I sold an article, Liberty &/Vs. Equality, to the Freeman in the summer of 1977. Paul Poirot was the editor who accepted it. That provided much encouragement to keep me going at a time when everything I sent elsewhere got thumbs down.

Sunni: How did you get from there to Playboy, and the New York Times and Wall Street Journal? Talk about strange bedfellows, to give you the expected pun ... [laughs]

Jim: After I got the Guggenheim Fellowship grant, things pretty much fell into place by themselves.

Sunni: [laughs]

Jim: Actually, that's not quite how it went. I kept writing and eventually it started selling. I sold a piece bashing the Postal Service to the Boston Globe in 1978; it was fun to thrash those rascals. I occasionally tried my hand at humorous writing, and, in what felt at the time like my final volley of submissions, I sent a satire on the failure of the all-volunteer Congress to the New York Times. To my great surprise, they published it on July 4, 1979, under the title, Why Not Draft the Next Congress?. This breakthrough encouraged me to keep on hammering. I noticed that liberal publications seemed to be far more open to unknown talent than were conservative publications. I don't know if this is still the case, though gauging from what I see in some conservative magazines, they may be prejudiced against any and all talent.

It was a long while before the writing paid the rent. In the meantime, I did path-breaking work at the Harvard Business School when I was hired as a snow shoveler after the Great Blizzard of '78. When I was living in Boston for about 9 months, I also worked as a Santa Claus (seasonal work but fun), wore a giant rabbit costume as part of a Filene's Department Store Beatrix Potter promotion, and unloaded 50-pound boxes of Idaho potatoes from a rail car. And there was my sordid past as a Kelly Girl. I kinda backed into this one ... I had gone to a temp agency responding to an ad for carrying a sandwich board; they said that job was filled but did I have any other skills. I shrugged. They asked if I knew how to type—I admitted as much—I took their typing test ... and was regrettably typecast away from the sandwich boards forever with that company. The typing paid better but [pauses] I occasionally set up and ran my own typing services when I was living near college campuses; some of the papers and theses I typed sparked my curiosity in government policies and specific boondoggles. I also worked mowing lawns, doing construction, penny-ante wheeling and dealing with rare coins, unloading trucks at a book bindery, and working checkout at a university library. I worked awhile as a census taker in southern Illinois in 1980, gathering enough dirt to pound the Census Bureau numerous times in subsequent articles. This was another job with hardship offers of free beer.

After I moved to the Washington area, I first wrote for the Washington Monthly, then later for Human Events and the following year for Policy Review. Beginning in the mid-80s, some editors at the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal liked my stuff so I did fairly well in those markets off and on through the late 1990s. Tim Ferguson at the Journal during the 1980s was especially courageous in the articles he would run. Some other op-ed editors around the country also ran my stuff. I did some investigative pieces for Reader's Digest starting in 1984. About the time Lost Rights came out in 1994, I started selling pieces fairly regularly to Playboy and American Spectator.

Sunni: Wow, that's quite a job history you have! What prompted you to consider writing your first book?

Jim: A desire to deepen and broaden my thinking and a bias in favor of positive cash flow.

Sunni: How much has the publishing industry changed from the publication of it to the latest one, Attention Deficit Democracy?

Jim: It has not gotten smarter, that's for sure. Amazon, on the other hand, has made it much easier for people to find information about books and authors, as has the internet.

Sunni: Sure; both help keep the backlist more active. I would guess that most people think that because you've a string of books behind you, it's pretty much automatic that if you want to write another book, you'll be signed to do it. Is that true, or is it more as I suspect—that it's still tough for a libertarian author to get the major publishing houses to take him or her seriously?

Jim: I am not aware of pro-libertarian sentiment at any major publishing house. At best, some places tolerate libertarian views. Grudgingly. And when publishers do go with libertarian books, the PR budget is often impossible to detect without an electron microscope.

Sunni: Oh, now there's a surprise. Speaking of Attention Deficit Democracy, how's it doing? I suppose it's not getting as much attention as it might, since Cheney hasn't shot at you yet. [laughs]

Jim: The book is hitting a live nerve out there. I am pleased that it has revved lots of folks who have read it. As yet, Attention Deficit Democracy has not been reviewed in many print venues. I suspect many book review editors would prefer not to notice a book that highlights the profound systemic failures of the American political system. They are much more comfortable running reviews either of rah-rah pro-Bush books or of books by liberals that proclaim that the only thing we need to do to fix the problems is to elect a Democrat in 2008. Or maybe the book review editors simply don't like to read. I have been surprised at how many of the recent fashionable political books appear to be little more than double-spaced, bloated op-eds. Book review editors, like other editors, often operate in herds.

Sunni: Shhh! You're giving away my secret—I actually do read the books I review, and the reviews stick to the subject.

Jim: Well, you just blew any chance you might have had of writing reviews for the New York Times.

Sunni: [laughs] That's okay; I've never been that impressed with the Gray Lady anyway. I've seen on your blog where you have gotten some, um, fan mail, if I can use the term very loosely, for Attention Deficit Democracy. I bet you have fun with people who don't realize that you aren't just beating up on their favored boy ...

Jim: Email lets folks instantly display their penetrating grasp of a topic. The hate mail is often a hoot. I have been denounced scores of times for condemning Bush while I supposedly never criticized Clinton. This is a symptom of the attention deficits of folks who often shout the loudest. Or maybe the people who send such emails have computers infected with federal spyware that prevents them from accessing Google. I have also heard from lots of fine folks with thoughtful comments on my articles or books. I appreciate the encouragement—writing books is fairly solitary and one sometimes wonders what happens to the words after they are emailed to the publisher. Some emailers have opened my eyes to new aspects of a problem or some key detail of a government abuse that I was unaware of. And sometimes the challenges from emailers has helped me sharpen my thinking, or at least make it a bit less muddled.

Sunni: So, who's been worse so far with the abuse for you? The Clintonistas or the Busheviks?

Jim: I have heard far more from Bush supporters, but that may be partly due to the fact that far more people use email now than in the 1990s. Perhaps it is also a factor of the national mood changing after 9/11 ... perhaps rage is now a sign of conservative virtue, as it was for leftists in the late 1960s and 1970s. According to a Washington Post piece published on tax day, anger is now a hallmark of virtue among liberals who despise Bush. I don't perceive bulging eyes and throbbing forehead veins as signs of wisdom. High blood pressure is not a good proxy for having received a divine revelation.

Sunni: Definitely not. Which president is worse, in your opinion—Clinton or Bushnev?

Jim: Both were dreadful. Clinton might have been as bad as Bush if he had a Congress that was as servile. I have been surprised to see how many conservatives applaud the Bush team's bizarre argument that the president is above the Constitution any time the president says the word war. Many Washington conservatives would probably applaud Bush if he announced that God had crowned him king.

Sunni: Yep. No doubts on that here. I don't remember the first time I came across something you wrote, but I remember seeing you speak at a Future of Freedom Foundation event in January 1998, and you were the best speaker I heard.

Jim: Ah yes—you were the flower child in the second row!

Sunni: [laughs] So nice to know I made an impression on you! You were telling us all these awful things about the USSA government, but you were so clever about it—you seemed fairly optimistic. Last November at the Freedom Summit, you weren't quite as upbeat, but still irrepressible. Do you think of yourself as an optimist?

Jim: I was born optimistic. On the other hand, I have been surprised to see how much crap the American people have tolerated from the government, especially since 9/11. I have been surprised to see how easily politicians have tapped the dark side in so many psyches, and surprised to see how the cons still work four and a half years after the terrorist attack. I thought that Americans' self-respect—as far as refusing to be lied to by their rulers—would rebound much sooner after 9/11 than it has.

Sunni: You said something to me in email that suggests that we share a common view of some libertarians—that they seem fairly complacent about the state of freedom in this country.

Jim: I have been hearing how we are winning the war of ideas for decades—at the same time that federal power has grown by leaps and bounds. Libertarians cannot afford any more such Pyrrhic victories. Many libertarians seem to have a quasi-Marxist view of history—assuming that the triumph of liberty is fated. Actually, this is the official Bush view of history, canonizing the doggerel about the end of history [PDF] that Francis Fukuyama uncorked in 1989. This is drivel when Bush says it and it is no better when libertarians repeat the same notion. I suppose some libertarians hear Bush praising freedom and assume that freedom is safe. If that is their level of political literacy, it is no wonder their rights are evaporating.

Sunni: Geez, don't get me started on Fukuyama! Or libertarians who seem to think that the battle for liberty is exactly that—a battle with a clear winning and losing side that will never need to be engaged again. How can you stand immersing yourself into mainstream politics as much as you need to to write your books? Or are you able to maintain some kind of distance from the awful things you dig up?

Jim: There is an old story about two Greek philosophers ... the first one saw the injustices of daily life and spent all his time crying, and the other saw the absurdities of daily life and laughed. Getting greatly distraught over government abuses is a recipe for early burnout. Energy is finite, and the more I spend teeth-gnashing and swearing, the less I will have for digging and writing.

Sunni: That sounds a lot like the attitude my Sweetie has, Jim; his ability to laugh has helped me gain some perspective, even though I still get more upset than I know is wise. But now that I think about it, that question included a lot of assumptions about your politics, Jim; my apologies. You haven't been anything but encouraging to this ol' anarchist wench, but I'm not sure where your views lie. Care to enlighten me?

Jim: I agree with Jefferson that that government is best which governs least. I am in favor of greatly reducing government power. I am not keen on doctrinal disputes about philosophical purity—that is, whether anarchy is feasible now—at a time when the government power has become unbounded. The government has got no business doing the vast majority of the things it is doing nowadays. When choosing what to write about, I don't focus on government programs that can be fixed. Instead, my point is almost always that abolition is the only meaningful reform. This was a crux of the message of my work on farm subsidies, trade barriers, and a heap of petty nuisance bureaucracies and federal programs.

Sunni: A much-needed message that is, too. It was somewhat gratifying to have you vindicate my criticism of some libertarian think tanks as not contributing much to real freedom. Yet you regularly contribute to the Future of Freedom Foundation, you're listed as being a Cato Institute policy analyst, and recently had an excellent article published at Reason. Is it only some supposedly pro-freedom places you object to, or something more fundamental?

Jim: I have paper affiliations with quite a few places; the Future of Freedom Foundation is the only organization for which I regularly write. Lew Rockwell kindly picks up many of the pieces I have done for FFF. Jacob Hornberger has done a great job of standing on principle since 9/11, and before. I have never been on Cato's payroll, and I have not written anything for Cato since 1995. I did participate in book forums at Cato for two of my last five books. Cato has some excellent folks; Tim Lynch does superb analysis of how the Constitution is getting boarhawged [PDF]. But I have been surprised that top folks at Cato have endorsed the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretap program [Wall Street Journal link; the letter was reposted in the comments on a legal blog—search for gedaliya to find it] and unleashing the FBI to conduct warrantless surveillance at political gatherings and religious gatherings. Cato is also holding a debate between two of its top folks on the question of whether Bush's NSA warrantless wiretapping is legal. This is simply a question of whether the president is entitled to act as if the nation is under martial law—at least as far as the Fourth Amendment goes. That a libertarian think tank would promote—or even seriously consider—this idea speaks volumes of what Beltway libertarianism has become. It is frigging astounding that libertarians would be debating this! Cato has also tub-thumped [PDF] about how the Bush administration is bringing freedom to Iraq. And to my ear, Bush praising freedom is as grating as Stalin praising peace. Cato does excellent work on property rights—but property rights are not enough. What price are Beltway libertarians paying for respectability in Washington? Probably far more than many people would like to admit. I have been surprised that some libertarians have been so slow to engage on the torture issue.

On the other hand, many libertarians have consistently denounced Bush's power grabs from the first weeks after 9/11. The Mises Institute has never flinched, and Independent Institute's Bob Higgs, Ivan Eland, and Anthony Gregory have hammered the right issues for years. Sheldon Richman and the Foundation for Economic Education have done a lot of fine work. Harry Browne took to the barricades very quickly after the terrorist attacks and never backed down until his recent untimely death. You and Claire Wolfe have been out there banging away at the would-be tinhorn dictators year after year, keeping up the pressure on the bad guys.

Sunni: I haven't kept up with FFF since leaving Free-Market.Net, but I agree with you on Bumper; I have a lot of respect for him. Sheldon too, although I'm less familiar with him and his work. Do you have any ideas on why official libertariandom—that is, the policy wonks as opposed to bloggers—isn't taking on torture? It seems like an issue where there's really no question that USSA policy is immoral and wrong.

Jim: Playwright Henrik Ibsen said, Never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth. Some libertarians seem to assiduously avoid dirtying their white gloves. I think there is no better issue right now than torture to vivify how the federal government is off the leash. But instead of stooping to notice the torture, some Beltway libertarians seem far more excited about the possibility of eminent domain reform in Rhode Island or the privatization of the fire department in Yazoo, Mississippi. But if the government can consecrate its right to torture—then nothing else matters. Much of the think tank activisim in DC is donor-driven, and I guess there hasn't been much money in coming out against torture. Almost all the best work on torture has been done by New York-based groups like the ACLU, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch. Even the Washington Post editorial page has been more courageous on torture than most of the DC libertarian-leaning organizations.

Sunni: One thing that was eternally frustrating for me while working at FMN was the endless cycle of seeing very good ideas being put forward, but very little being done in response to them. Many mainstream people seem not to be persuaded by arguments for greater liberty; but lots of libertarians themselves seem to think that all we have to do to advance the cause is write or talk about it. And we usually end up arguing, which doesn't help either.

Jim: I suspect some libertarians greatly overestimate how attractive liberty is to today's Americans. How many young people and college students would happily permit the government to monitor all their e-mail in return for unlimited free music downloads? How many McDonald's gift certificates would it take to sway a person to pledge never to publicly criticize the president? How many people would happily surrender most of their constitutional rights in return for a president's promise that he will thereby make them safe? Many Americans are far more interested in being cared for than being left alone. This is why American democracy is becoming one of caretakers and cage keepers, instead of representatives with narrowly prescribed duties.

Sunni: It seems to me that the slide from freedom to tyranny is inevitable—and that it takes a revolution of some sort to create a new system based on liberty. It wasn't addressed that explicitly, but that's one of the observations I made after reading Empire of Debt. In some ways it's a very good companion book to Attention Deficit Democracy. Have you read it, or read Bonner's essays at Lew Rockwell?

Jim: I have seen and enjoyed his essays on Rockwell. You're right; I should get the book. It sounds very interesting.

Sunni: You've taken on a diverse set of subjects in your books, Jim: agriculture, fair trade, liberty in general, and of course, Clinton and Bush. How do you decide when a topic is book-worthy?

Jim: It needs two things: first, something that I feel strongly about; and second, something that will hopefully interest a broader public. And it needs to be something that will fetch an editor, a publisher, and an advance. If it is not a subject that gets me revved, then I will not be able to perpetuate the energy necessary for the digging and the writing.

Sunni: Which of your books is your favorite? Which has sold best?

Jim: Lost Rights has sold the most copies, at least here in the U.S. It is very hard to get accurate numbers on sales of foreign editions. In Lost Rights, I tried to walk readers through the facts of government abuses in area after area, from asset forfeiture to the drug war to gun confiscations to tax tyranny to repressing free speech. I sought to frame the current issues with quotes from the Founding Fathers, as well as providing some theoretical perspectives. Freedom in Chains is much more philosophical and historical, but I tried to use a similar combination of facts and theory to give readers a vivid sense of the principles. I enjoyed writing Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years because it gave me a chance to pull together, update, and sum up much of the investigative and policy writing I had done since 1993. Writing Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice and Peace to Rid the World of Evil was satisfying because I felt early on that the Bush administration was dishonestly exploiting 9/11 to seize nearly boundless power. Many of the abuses of the war on terror closely parallel earlier drug war abuses. Unfortunately, most Americans seem clueless as far as drawing a lesson about how politicians whip up fears. The Bush Betrayal gave me a chance to marshal the best evidence I could find on the abuses and crimes of the Bush administration. With Attention Deficit Democracy, I try to tie together the lessons of the past and the abuses of the present—to help Americans recognize how their government is going off the rails and how politicians' rhetoric is now almost a total sham. Elections are becoming reverse slave auctions, with voters simply choosing who they will be exploited by and sacrificed for. Unfortunately, many Americans believe that as long as they are permitted a choice of who rules them, their freedom is safe. And much of the media and the political-intellectual establishment has bought into the prevailing frauds—as long as they get to reflect the prestige of the State—or at least to rub elbows with dignitaries at Georgetown dinner parties.

Sunni: I for one think you splendidly achieved what you set out to do. Being a former researcher myself, I can understand digging into the history of bureaucracies like the USDA or FDA, but I don't think even my very strong stomach could handle what you must've waded through to write Feeling Your Pain, Terrorism and Tyranny, The Bush Betrayal, and Attention Deficit Democracy. What keeps you digging into that muck?

Jim: It takes little to amuse the simple, as my father always said. I enjoy the challenge of discovering what the feds are up to, and then explaining it in a way that helps other people recognize the abuses or the absurdities. It is fun to watch someone read something I wrote, and to see their eyes widen and their forehead shift at the moment they get it.

Sunni: It's got to be very rewarding to see that, too. What are a few of the things you've found while doing book research that have disgusted or angered you most?

Jim: Geez. You got space limitations for this interview, right?

Sunni: Nope—expound away!

Jim: Over the years, there have been many things that made my jaw drop. Researching Waco provided plenty of out-loud groans. I was amazed when the U.S. Marshals Service gave its highest valor awards to the marshals that killed 14-year-old Sammy Weaver—after they killed his dog.

Sunni: Oh boy. We could spend all day on Waco and Ruby Ridge. Have you come up with any explanation for how so many Americans could see those events and not, at the very friggin' least, display a little concern at what the federal government was doing? I gave up trying before I got to one ...

Jim: I thought Waco should have been the most important public education lesson of the 1990s. Instead, it was brushed aside. The only time that it was fashionable in Washington to talk about it was the months between the Republican takeover of Congress in November 1994 and the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995. The Clinton administration managed to turn the Republicans into quivering jello on this issue. I recall talking to some of the Republican congressional staffers during the House hearings on Waco in July 1995. One of the young staffers, with a look of great distress, pointed to boxes of documents from the Justice Department and ATF on Waco that had been sent over at the last minute. The staffer whined that they didn't know what to do with them. I asked, Have you thought about reading them? I forget the staffer's response, but there is little evidence that they even bothered sifting through the evidence. This is one of the unrecognized elements of Attention Deficit Democracy: congressmen and their staffers often have no idea in hell what they are doing.

Sunni: If I were to do the kind of writing you do, I'd have gotten high blood pressure after the first book; by the third or fourth, I'd be such a raving nutjob the men in white coats would be called to take me away. How do you manage to keep your sanity while tackling such depressing subjects?

Jim: What's your definition of sanity? Are you grading on a sliding scale? There is an element of sport to some of these investigations—some cat and mouse elements. I was digging into AmeriCorps in 1999 and came across a thumbnail of a Mississippi Delta program that sent AmeriCorps members door to door to sign people up for food stamps. The program description perked up my ears, so I filed a Freedom of Information Act request, read through their grant applications and quarterly reports to AmeriCorps headquarters, and then went down to the Delta to pay them a visit. The lady I interviewed was very cagey—but made one concession after another about what they were up to. After I got back to DC, I had a chat with the AmeriCorps Inspector General office. They launched an investigation, the FBI joined in, and it turned out this particular program had some small town mayors and others as ghost employees. The lady in charge was convicted and sent to prison. So every now and then there is a happy ending.

Sunni: Ha! I bet that was quite satisfying.

Jim: It would have been far more satisfying if AmeriCorps itself had gotten sent up the river and sunk. On the bright side, when Bush was pushing to rapidly expand AmeriCorps just after 9/11, a number of the opponents of such bloating were tapping into my writings for evidence of AmeriCorps' follies and frauds.

Sunni: Sure; but given how long some of the ag subsidies and whatnot have hung around, it can't be surprising that AmeriCorps is still in existence. But back to you, Jim: Not only do you stay sane, but you seem very relaxed and friendly. How do you do that? It was a lot of fun to talk with you some after your Freedom Summit presentation; I remember wishing I could laugh about it all the way you do.

Jim: Ernie Hancock and Marc Victor do such a good job of making the Freedom Summit a pleasant experience for speakers and attendees. There were so many fine folks who came to that event. It is easy to be friendly with the kind of fine folks at that Phoenix gig. I am not as friendly when dealing with TSA weevils. I enjoyed the chance to catch up with you there—you bring much enthusiasm and joy to your speeches. You have a vivacity that is regrettably uncommon among libertarians.

Sunni: Gosh ... Well, thanks Jim. To me, freedom isn't some dry academic subject ... it's real, it's my life, and other people's lives we're talking about here. And I have never been anything if not passionate. Marc and Ernie deserve a lot more recognition than they get for the Freedom Summit. Even though it ended up costing me money to go last year—and that was entirely my doing, not theirs—I had such a great time that I plan on going back this year if there's any way possible I can. Maybe you and I could offer a workshop on enjoying personal freedom while political and economic freedoms go down the crapper. You could lead meditation sessions and I'll provide the food! [laughs]

Jim: Hmmm... Well, I'm sure the food would be top-rate!

Sunni: [laughs] It's been a long time since I read Feeling Your Pain, but I remember being horrified by a lot of what you covered. I know I'm not the first to say it, but Bushnev makes me think back wistfully to the Clinton days. And Bush and his cronies are fundamentally just an extension of Clinton et al ... I mean, how much difference is there really between Ashcroft or Alberto Gonzalez and Janet Reno? And what's really scary to think about is what will come next. I just don't see things getting better before they get much worse ... do you?

Jim: I thought Reno would be the worst attorney general for a long time, but Ashcroft officially trumped her on December 6, 2001, when he proclaimed that Those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty ... only aid terrorists for they erode our national unity and ... give ammunition to America's enemies. Reno's power grabs and horrendous abuses appeared to many people as anomalies. Yet Ashcroft and Gonzales seem determined to carve out the political principles for absolutism.

I don't see things getting better any time sooner, but I don't have the gift of prophecy.

Sunni: Right; and it's hard to laugh at prospects that are worse than what we've already seen.

Jim: This is part of what I like about your message—that people need to enjoy their own lives—to live free on a personal level and not wait for some grandiose political reform to redeem and give purpose to their daily existence.

Sunni: Right; that strategy seems to me to just enslave them to what they hate in a more subtle, but just as destructive way. Has covering national politics for all these years changed your political views? Have you become more cynical or less optimistic because of all you've found out about the political process?

Jim: I was never an optimist regarding politicians or political processes. Maybe my cynicism rose along with Bush's approval ratings, though I have not noticed a comparable decline since Bush's ratings fell.

Sunni: You mentioned impeachment earlier; do you think that idea's going to go anywhere? And if it did among the plebes, would Congress do anything or would it be even worse than the Clinton debacle?

Jim: It is encouraging that more people are talking about it. This is a sign that many Americans are not politically brain dead, and that they still have some spirit of resistance in their blood. I think if the files in the White House were opened, the abuses and power grabs would be so stunning that the Republicans would suffer far worse at the polls in November than they currently expect. Bush is still president in part because we have probably seen only the tip of the iceberg of his abuses. Unfortunately, the media and the political establishment have acceded to nearly-boundless presidential secrecy.

Sunni: As I've already mentioned, I've seen you speak a couple of times, and both times, you wound up your talk by pulling out a big cigar. You also make jokes about coping with the increasing loss of freedom by buying more guns, ammo, and alcohol. And I can totally imagine you sitting and pounding away at your keyboard while chomping a cigar ... but then you threw me for a loop when you told me about the peanut butter cake recipe you developed. Do you cook a lot?

Jim: I try to keep the cigar ashes out of the baking mixes. I cook some; depends on the mood, the occasion, which public figures have just been indicted, etc.

Sunni: Is baking what you like to do most when you do cook? Have a favorite cuisine or two? For me, cooking—especially baking, and now, candy-making—is an excellent way to work off stress.

Jim: I enjoy spicy food—Ethiopian, Greek, Thai, and American BBQ. If I am cooking, I am prejudiced against labor-intensive recipes. I enjoy torquing up a recipe to see how much of the kicker ingredient it can tolerate. I came across a recipe for French blueberry pancakes that works great if you roughly triple the amount of blueberries called for.

Sunni: I guess that prejudice is why you didn't mention Indian food, which I like a lot. And yeah, playing with recipes is great fun! You've also been very encouraging about the truffle business I'm starting. Would it embarrass you too much if I called my peanut butter truffle the Bovard or something like that? [laughs]

Jim: How much alcohol are you planning to include in that particular truffle?

Sunni: [laughs] I've seen several nut-based liqueurs, but peanut isn't one of them. Got any suggestions?

Jim: The Germans make excellent hazelnut liqueurs, but I doubt that peanut farmers in Georgia and Virginia are as booze-savvy as the Deutsch. I have been a peanut butter fanatic since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. Savoring peanut butter is an excellent culinary prejudice for a freelance writer.

Sunni: I'm right there with you, as long as the peanut butter is high quality. The overly processed, sweetened goop most people think of as peanut butter is unpalatable to me. I think you sent me a couple of links for resources for natural nut butters that I've been wanting to try.

Jim: Absolutely: I am not recommending Skippy. I wandered into a natural foods store shortly before my first quarter of college, discovered natural peanut butter, and haven't looked back. Arrowheads Mills makes superb peanut butter. Whole Foods has a very good natural-type peanut butter that is priced reasonably. I have recently gotten into almond butter, and Trader Joe's has a superb almond butter that helps kickstart my mornings. Which reminds me—I should update my hit on the federal almond cartel.

Sunni: [laughs] Go after the sugar idiocy too while you're at it! Do you enjoy doing the book promotion gigs? Or have the interviews and callers gotten too predictable?

Jim: I often enjoy them. Some of the hosts are excellent; the hosts that have read all or parts of the book routinely provide the most enthusiastic comments on the work. It is sometimes fascinating to hear what resonates with listeners. I have been surprised at the response on some shows; any mention of U.S. torture still provokes a torrent of phone calls denouncing me for slandering the government, being un-American, etc. But I wasn't the one who made torture the official policy of the U.S. government. Some talk show hosts had me on in order to try to chop me off at the knees. Hopefully the ensuing verbal brawls made good listening.

Sunni: I imagine they do. It'd be a great resource if you could offer MP3s of your interviews, or have a page of links to audio files available from the shows themselves. Don't you love how I come up with more nonpaying work ideas for you? [laughs]

Jim: That is an excellent idea. I have a number of links scattered through the blog ... There are excellent libertarian hosts out there now: Bassmaster Brian Wilson in Toledo, Gardner Goldsmith in New Hampshire, and Charles Goyette in Phoenix and Air America. There are a number of other excellent hosts who are libertarian friendly, including Ron Smith, the top talk show host in Baltimore, and Jan Mickelson, the top talk show host in Iowa. Last I checked, the following links to shows are active. Aaron Zelman of Jews for the Presevation of Firearms Ownership kindly interviewed me on the new book [MP3]. Joy Cardin of Wisconsin Public Radio asked a lot of excellent questions—as did the callers—in a show I did back on January 25 [RM]. I had a heavy cold for both the JPFO and Wisconsin interviews; I don't usually sound that muddled.

Sunni: That sounds like a decent start. It's got to be very nice to see some of the good things others say about your work, but it was amusing for me to see some of the things your targets have had to say. I can imagine you chuckling over that kind of stuff, too ... so, which is more fun for you?

Jim: I got a big grin when FBI director Louis Freeh publicly attacked an article I wrote about Ruby Ridge. Later revelations proved that the FBI knew or should have known that almost all the claims that Freeh made in the FBI's defense were as bogus as a $3 bill. But it was fascinating to see how Freeh became an icon—if not a saint—for so many conservatives during the Clinton era. Simply because he went through the motions of opposing some of Clinton's stuff, that meant that he had a blank check to cover up or misrepresent what the FBI did at Ruby Ridge and Waco (both of which occurred before he became FBI director).

Sunni: I honestly don't know how a thinking person could ever really believe that any government-sponsored investigation is anything but the ol' fox and henhouse situation. And I'm not convinced the independent investigations really are, not in the ways that matter. That's one reason why I think your work is so important. As a genuinely concerned, pro-freedom writer, you seem willing to take on anyone who tries to wield political power. Can only a freelancer like yourself be independent enough to be sufficiently critical of the information and people involved in an investigation?

Jim: Some of the federal investigations have been fairly honest and have uncovered 14-karat dirt. Sometimes the investigations unearth good facts but don't put them together, which creates an opportunity for the peanut gallery. But you are right—many of the so-called independent investigations are total frauds. This has been especially true for the torture scandal—Bush bragged last year about how there had been 8 or 9 independent investigations of torture—and no one in Washington shouted, Bullshit!.

As for the positive comments on my work, I appreciate them very much. It helps to know when I have written something which resonates intensely with folks. And given the prevailing political views in this neck of the woods, it is encouraging to hear that Americans beyond the Beltway are less servile in their attitude towards government than around here.

Sunni: Have all your detractors given up? Is that why the most recent item on that page is ten years old? [laughs]

Jim: I never denied being laggardly on updating the web site. The Justice Department despised what I wrote on the Patriot Act and attacked me by name on their goofy web site pimping for it. The Bush Betrayal generated heaps of denunciations, posted at Lew Rockwell's site. The number of denunciations by government officials has slackened in part because fewer newspapers are willing to print vigorous attacks on government policies. Many op-ed editors seem far more risk averse than a decade ago. As a result, government gets away with more crimes and cons.

Sunni: That official picture of Gonzalez incites impulses in me that I probably shouldn't state publicly. What an obsequious toad!

Jim: And yet he is treated deferentially in most of Washington. Because he is less visibly obnoxious than John Ashcroft, he is a statesman-in-waiting.

Sunni: With so many outlets for your writing, what prompted you to begin blogging?

Jim: It was part of the terms of my parole.

Sunni: [laughs] Which parole is that, specifically? Are you enjoying doing it?

Jim: Parole or the blog?

Sunni: [laughs] The blogging, of course!

Jim: Yes, I am enjoying it. It is fun to write without the challenge or aggravation of marketing. It is fun to be able to zip out an idea when it is fresh. It helps keeps some of the rust off my keyboard. I especially appreciate the excellent comments many folks have added to the blog. Bantering with them in the comment section is a real treat.

Sunni: I agree, Jim; the conversations can be more fun than the blogging itself for me. Speaking of feedback ... I like the detail you go into in your books, and especially appreciate your excellent documentation. But I can see where some people might say that you engage in overkill in making your point. Do you see that criticism as mostly a symptom of our sound-bite society?

Jim: I am reminded of the joke that Woody Allen told at the start of Annie Hall. There are these two old ladies complaining about a Catskills resort. The first says, Boy, the food at this place is really terrible. The other one says, Yeah, I know; and such small portions. Some people react to my books by saying, This guy's conclusions are all full of crap. And besides, he has too much evidence. If my books and articles pronounced the same conclusions as most writers, I would need little or no evidence to support them. But the further outside conventional wisdom or acceptable opinion the conclusions, the higher the standard of proof becomes. The greater the heresy, the more evidence required to buttress it. Vivid evidence is vital to persuading people on the danger of government power. If I sought only to preach to the choir, I would dispense with the evidence and go directly to passing judgment.

Sunni: And that would reduce you to being just another one of the libertarian mental wankers like me, instead of contributing the hard work that allows us to point and say, See? We're right!

Jim: Females can be wankers? Dang, another youthful illusion of mine bites the dust. You are out there slugging away—you have a broad following—and a lot of people come to your site for news and views. Don't underestimate how your efforts may be resonating in broader circles. You are keeping the fire burning hot.

Sunni: Now we're getting close to Bacchus' territory—which reminds me: he told me I could tell you that before he started down the path to becoming a king of smut, he was a lawyer, so there's hope for you to successfully transition, too, if you want. But, back on track here ... Rational ignorance, opportunity cost, apathy, and a number of other explanations have been offered to explain why USSA citizens don't pay a lot of attention to electoral politics. Especially when the outrages are flying thick and fast, as they have been with Bushnev for some time, it's hard to avoid becoming cynical or burned out. Why do you think people seem to tune out so much?

Jim: Various reasons. Some people tune out because they don't realize the danger of permitting other people to have arbitrary, coercive power over them. Some people don't give a damn about either freedom or controlling their own lives. Some people assume that it is hopeless to resist. And the more people who reach that conclusion, the easier it becomes for politicians to seize more power. There is nothing wrong with being cynical, as long as the cynicism does not make a person assume that everything is futile.

Sunni: Excellent point, Jim. It's never futile, as history shows ... But success isn't possible if one doesn't try.

Jim: And there is honor in fighting for one's rights and liberties, regardless of the outcome.

Sunni: Yes. As best I can recall, your overall tone throughout your books has been one of respect for what the Founding Fathers established with the Constitution. Is that accurate?

Jim: Absolutely. As the old saying goes, The Constitution isn't perfect, but it's better than what we have now.

Sunni: Do you think it's possible to get the federal government we're currently saddled with back within those constraints? Or is another revolution necessary for liberty to advance again?

Jim: At the least, Americans must revolutionize their thinking about politicians' prerogative to lie to them and trample their rights.

Sunni: And that isn't going to happen as long as most parents send their kids to the government youth indoctrination camps, as Vin Suprynowicz calls them. This is a question probably best pondered at leisure over a few cold ones, and I'd love to do that with you someday, but I'm still gonna ask it now: the mess we're currently in is a hugely tangled ball. How does one choose an optimum place to begin detangling?

Jim: I don't have a good answer for that. Different friends of freedom have different passions—and there is no universal best way to begin standing up for your rights and liberties. Some of the gun groups have done superb work, some of the property rights groups have succeeded brilliantly, the fully informed jury folks have won some big battles, and the home-schoolers are planting seeds for the future. I think it would help if libertarians did more solid reading. Some libertarians I have met seem to believe that knowing and repeating a few phrases is sufficient. This type of complacency makes it very difficult to help non-libertarians recognize and understand how government imperils their own lives. It is not enough to know that most politicians are liars and that most government interventions are scams. Libertarians have to go beyond talk-radio-level comprehension of the issues.

Sunni: How far would you go to defend this country and the principles that led to its birth? Can you see yourself ever bailing and going expat somewhere?

Jim: Would West Virginia count as expat?

Sunni: [laughs] I imagine so, at least in parts of the deep back country. But even there, you're still within this country's borders and therefore likely to become made a target if the busybodies were ever so inclined.

Jim: Actually, I might not mesh so well with the deeper, darker parts of West Virginia. I was driving through the mountains of western North Carolina in August 2001, looking for a small hotel. I pulled up to a hardware store in a one-horse village to ask directions and this big ol' bald guy comes tromping out the door and asks, What part of Maryland you from? He starts chatting me up, and after about 15 minutes, he admitted that he thought I was an undercover federal agent. Why? I asked. Because you are driving a black car and it has Maryland license plates, he astutely explained. He then said that the federal cars always have these GPS tracking devices hidden in the back of the car, underneath the trunk. I invited him to check out the ol' Ford Contour, and he did—and then, after discovering no incriminating evidence, became quite friendly. I talked with him for a couple hours, and he invited me to stop by his place—I passed. Turns out that this was the part of North Carolina where Eric Rudolph was suspected of hiding out. The FBI had come down there en masse a year or so earlier. The FBI had been so arrogant towards the local folks that they soon got no help; and he said that at least one restaurant refused to serve them food. Good folks down there west of Asheville. [pauses] I find that some of the bureaucrats I deal with in Washington think I am a redneck—and then the rednecks think I'm an undercover fed. What's a po' country boy to do?

Sunni: I don't know, Jim; I've never been good at fitting in either. Is it sometimes frustrating for you, that your opportunities for activism are somewhat constrained by being well known? I mean, I think it'd be pretty hard for you to become an income tax or Real ID refusenik, for example ...

Jim: It is still possible to have some fun. I biked along and around the anti-war march in DC last September. Having a bike was the best way to deal with—and occasionally avoid—the mob. As I was coming down 17th St. by the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House, some fat cop comes trotting out into the street and raises a long stick in the air, like he is getting ready to do some chopping exercise to narrow his gut. I was puzzled at first and then realized that the dude's stick appeared to be intended for me personally. I didn't realize that the street was closed—some other cop grunts something about how I had to detour. I swung off on a street to the right and left the stick cop in the dust. This was an area where there were almost zero demonstrators around, so the cops might have felt free to attack, unimpeded by the omnipresent camcorders. Almost all the streets were obstructed in one way or another—the cops had their metal sawhorses all over the place—and they were changing what streets were closed at various times arbitrarily, as far as I could tell. The police didn't clearly mark which streets are closed to all traffic—and yet felt entitled to attack anyone who didn't obey the secret rules. Sort of the paradigm for contemporary American freedom. I'll send you a picture I took of one of the cops.

Sunni: Nice doughboy! Which is not to minimize the threat he represents ...

Jim: I don't think he has won any 100 yard dashes recently.

Sunni: What things give you the most hope for the future of liberty, Jim?

Jim: Perhaps the current level of abuses will eventually spur a backlash, as happened here after World War I. On the other hand, perhaps that is the same thing that urbane Italians said as they watched Mussolini's march on Rome in 1922. Just because things are getting bad does not mean that they cannot get one helluva lot worse. Sometimes the best you can hope for is to keep up a skirmish line in the battle of ideas—to conduct a rearguard action to slow the advance of Leviathan. Maybe times will change and lost liberties can be recaptured.

Sunni: Well, like you, I'm an optimist at heart, and I am certain that some element of mankind will rediscover freedom. What I am not certain about is whether I'll live to see it. When you aren't researching a project, what do you read for fun? What web sites do you like to visit regularly?

Jim: I enjoy reading history, philosophy, good essays, and humor. I keep a copy of Huckleberry Finn at the bedside, right next to the .357. As for web sites ... the White House web site is often a hoot, given the Bush speeches and interviews there. I enjoy your web site; I check Claire Wolfe's about every day; and some other sites I hit are Antiwar.com, Democratic Underground, Talking Points Memo, LewRockwell.com, Cursor.org, the Dilbert Blog, and the usual suspects among newspapers.

Sunni: Got any ideas for your next book yet?

Jim: Yes. But the idea is half-baked right now, so I will leave it in the oven awhile longer.

Sunni: What a tease! Understandable, but still a tease. Jim, I've taken a lot of your time today, and have enjoyed every bit of it. I'm so glad you chose to spend some time with me at the Freedom Summit! Do you have any last words of wisdom before we wrap up?

Jim: Sunni, thanks for asking so many great questions! I really appreciate all the effort you put into this interview. This is a rare satisfaction for an author, and a pleasant contrast to the type of interviews that begin, So..... why is the cover of the book blue? I mean, couldn't you have used green instead?

Sunni: [laughs]

Jim: I appreciate all you have done to help make people aware of liberty and the perils it faces; and I hope you can keep hell-raising on the web and elsewhere for at least as long as the government thinks best.

Sunni: Jim, really, it's I who owe you a lot of gratitude. What you're doing takes far more courage, and is much more wide-reaching than my musings and rants. I hope our paths cross again soon.

Jim: Likewise. Maybe I will even be able to persuade you of the benefits of pilsner. But I expect the next time you show up at any freedom event, it may be difficult to get a word in edgewise with you, since you will be mobbed with folks demanding truffles!

Sunni: [laughs] Aha! The plot thickens! My Sweetie has already instilled a love of pilsner in me. I just can't drink a lot of it.

Jim: That is not a problem—unless you want to acquire a beer keg physique. By the way, on May 2, FFF is sponsoring a talk by me at the National Press Club on Attention Deficit Democracy. Should be lots of fun. The admission is free, and the event is walking distance from the best brewery in the Washington area.

Sunni: Wish I could join you! No wonder I think you're such a sweetie too—you and he have several important things in common. And don't worry, I will make time for you whenever we meet up again! Take good care, Jim! - Sunni [See original for links.]

posted by George Thomas Kysor 10:18 PM

musical video 

Every Breath You Take
Parody by Columbia Business School Students (via Mises Economics Blog)

posted by George Thomas Kysor 8:15 AM

Senators to push for $100 gas rebate checks 

How I will spend my gas rebate check and what it will cost you.

20 bucks worth of tequila
50 bucks on illicit drugs ( a few bowls of Columbian perhaps)
30 bucks of double deuces

Get "caught" by the man.
30,000 for the man to prosecute me
50,000 for the man to double check prosecuting me
90,000 for some kind of incarceration
150,000 for rehab by the man
AND another 100 bucks when I get out!
guess how I will spend it! - SurferDude

posted by George Thomas Kysor 7:20 AM

A Very Kind Master 

Our master is very kind.

Our master allows us to keep half of the money we make at work. The other half goes to help other workers. They could get sick or fired and thus the master would help them through our compassionate contributions.

Our master protects our minds when we watch TV or listen to the radio. We are very sensitive to profanity and obscenity and thus our master takes care of our children and families so that they will grow up in a healthy environment.

Our master performs marvelous public works. Often times our homes need to be demolished so that a highway, or a store or a school can be built there. This does not worry us; we are compensated and happy to accept our fate for the benefit of society.

Our master has an extensive list of things that we cannot ingest. Only a healthy society can be a free society. When our minds and bodies are in unison with the master’s desires, there is peace and cooperation.

Our master looks out for our country and national interests by performing preemptive actions that neutralize foreign aggressors and diminish any desire for future attacks against us.

Our master monitors our conversations and communications. This guarantees that any potential threat is handled before innocent people are hurt. We are much safer this way. It is better to stamp out evil before it adopts human form.

Our master cares so much for us that large publications of rules and regulations have been distributed among us so that we can follow them for our own good. Our businesses can now thrive. Market failures are a thing of the past. We welcome any new guidelines and yearn to enact them immediately.

Our master keeps all the weapons, watches over us and keeps us safe. We cannot harm each other now.

Yes, our master is very kind. Let us go to sleep tonight knowing that we are in great hands. - Manuel Lora Copyright © 2006 LewRockwell.com [See the Fair Use Notice, below.]

posted by George Thomas Kysor 12:18 AM

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Knit Motorcycle 

Garth from Extreme Craft pointed us to a fantastic story he did on artist Theresa Honeywell who created this knit motorcycle which is on display now through April 30th at the Georgia Museum of Art. Honeywell's work explores the cool tough male world with her pieces like the knit tool belt, knit jackammer, as well as embroidery work of tattoo designs. [ via ] Link.
- Natalie Zee Permalink

posted by George Thomas Kysor 6:56 PM

Sunday, April 23, 2006

A Royal Visit... 

It’s officially spring in Baghdad. We jokingly say that in Iraq, spring doesn’t exist. We go immediately from cold, windy weather to a couple of months of humidity and dust storms, to a blazing, dry heat, i.e. summer. This is the month, however, for rolling up the carpeting and rugs and taking out the summer clothes.

Unpacking the summer clothes and putting away the winter clothes is a process that takes about a week in our household. When the transition from winter clothes to summer clothes is finally over, the house ends up smelling of naphthalene, and unused hand soap, which is sometimes used to store clothes or linen in order to ward off insects.

Besides the usual ‘spring cleaning’, etc. the last few weeks have been volatile, even by Iraqi standards. The area of A’adhamiya in Baghdad has seen some heavy fighting, especially during the last week. There’s almost always some action in A’adhamiya but a week ago it got to the point where there was open fighting in the streets between Ministry of Interior militias and guerrillas. As a result of this, we have an elderly relative staying with us. Her son, my mother’s second cousin, dropped her off at our house with the words, “Her heart can’t take all the excitement. Some bullets shattered the windows on the second floor and we thought she was going to have a heart-attack.”

Apparently, prior to this latest outbreak of violence in A’adhamiya, there was a ‘silent agreement’ between the guerrillas and the Iraqi police that no attacks would be launched against Iraqi security forces in the area as long as Iraqi special commandos (Interior Ministry militias) would not attack homes in the area as they have been doing for the last year.

So we’ve been spending the days with Bibi Z. (‘Bibi’ being a Baghdadi word meaning “granny” or “nana”) We don’t know her exact age, but we estimate she’s well into her eighties. She has a deceptively frail look about her- soft, almost transparent skin, a small face framed with long wisps of white hair. Her dark eyes are still very alive and have a look of permanent fascination because her brows are so white, they barely show up against her skin.

Having the distinction of being the oldest member of an Iraqi family has its privileges. Bibi Z. has installed herself as temporary reigning queen of the household- moving from room to room with the grace and authority of royalty. Within ten minutes of arriving at our house, she occupied my room and I was promptly relegated to the uncomfortable sofa in the living room. She spends the hours supervising everything from homework to housework, and inevitably advising on the best ways to store winter clothes, roll up the carpeting, and study algebra. Although she no longer cooks, she sometimes deigns to sample our cooking and always finds it in need of a spoon of this, or a pinch of that.

It’s always fascinating to sit with one of the older generation of Iraqis. They inspire mixed feelings- they’ve seen so much tragedy and triumph living in a country like Iraq, that it leaves one feeling both excited at the possibilities and frustrated with what seems to be a lifetime of instability.

Bibi Z.’s first memories are of the monarchy and she clearly remembers all the other subsequent governments and leaders; she even has gossip about some of the ones making a comeback now. “That young fellow wanting to be the king,” she says of Al Sharif Ali, “I think he’s the result of an affair between one of the princesses and an Egyptian palace servant.” She confides, as we watch him in a brief reportage on one of the Iraqi channels.

At around 10 am this morning, the electricity went out and it was too early for the generator. I commented that we wouldn’t be able to see what had happened overnight unless we listened to the radio. Bibi Z. told us about the first television she saw- in 1957. One of their wealthier neighbors had acquired a television and as soon as her husband headed off to work, the ladies in the area would gather at her house to watch an hour of television. “We would put on our abbayas when the male tv presenter was speaking,” she laughed. “It took Umm Adil two weeks to convince us that the presenter couldn’t see us just as we saw him.”

“And were the politicians just as bad?” I asked later as we watched Jaffari make some comments.

“History repeats itself… Politicians are opportunists… But they don’t worry me- they were bad, but Iraqis were better.” She continued to explain that through all of the drama and change that combine to form the colorful mosaic of the Iraqi political scene during the previous century, one thing remained constant- Iraqi loyalty and solicitude towards one another.

She talked of the student revolts during the years of the monarchy. “When Iraq signed the Portsmouth Treaty, the students revolted and organized demonstrations against the king- they were chased throughout Baghdad. My father was a police officer and yet when they chased the students into our area, we slipped them into the house and helped them get away by jumping from rooftop to rooftop. Iraqis were Iraqis and we had our differences, but we took care of each other… And women and children were sacred- no one dared touch the women and children of the house.”

The one unforgivable sin back then was to have loyalties to the foreign occupier. “Today, the only ones who can guarantee their survival are the ones with the loyalties to an occupier- and even they aren’t safe.” She sighed heavily as she said this, her prayer beads clicking gently in her thin hands.

“For the first time in many years, I fear death.” She said last night to no one in particular, as we sat around after dinner, sipping tea. We all objected, wishing her a longer life, telling her she had many years ahead of her, God willing. She shook her head at us like we didn’t understand- couldn’t possibly understand. “All people die eventually and I’ve had a longer life than most Iraqis- today children and young people are dying. I only fear death because I was born under a foreign occupation… I never dreamed I would die under one.” - Riverbend

posted by George Thomas Kysor 12:41 AM

Saturday, April 22, 2006

White House knew there were no WMD: CIA 

The CIA had evidence Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction six months before the 2003 US-led invasion but was ignored by a White House intent on ousting Saddam Hussein, a former senior CIA official said, according to CBS.

Tyler Drumheller, who headed CIA covert operations in Europe during the run-up to the Iraq war, said intelligence opposing administration claims of a WMD threat came from a top Iraqi official who provided the US spy agency with other credible information.

The source "told us that there were no active weapons of mass destruction programs," Drumheller said in a CBS interview to be aired on Sunday on the US network's 60 Minutes.

"The (White House) group that was dealing with preparation for the Iraq war came back and said they were no longer interested," he was quoted as saying in interview excerpts released by CBS on Friday.

"We said: 'Well, what about the intel?' And they said: 'Well, this isn't about intel anymore. This is about regime change'," added Drumheller, whose CIA operation was assigned the task of debriefing the Iraqi official.

He was the latest former US official to accuse the White House of setting an early course toward war in Iraq and ignoring intelligence that conflicted with its aim.

CBS said the CIA's intelligence source was former Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri and that former CIA Director George Tenet delivered the information personally to US President George W Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top White House officials in September 2002. They rebuffed the CIA three days later.

"The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy," the former CIA agent told CBS.

US allegations that Saddam had WMD and posed a threat to international security was a main justification for the March 2003 invasion.

A 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, to which the CIA was a major contributor, concluded that prewar Iraq had an active nuclear program and a huge stockpile of unconventional weapons.

No such weapons have been found, however, and US assertions that they existed are now regarded as a hugely damaging intelligence failure.

But Drumheller, co-author of a forthcoming book entitled On the Brink: How the White House Has Compromised American Intelligence, rejects the notion of an intelligence failure. - NineMSN ©AAP 2006. © 1997- 2006 ninemsn Pty Ltd. [See the Fair Use Notice, below.] (via Information Clearing House)

posted by George Thomas Kysor 12:04 PM

Keynesian Economics: A THOUSAND CLOWNS 

Economics has been called the "dismal science." But even that is merely
fraud and flattery. Economics is dismal, but it isn't science. At its best
it is merely voyeurism - peeping in people's windows as they go about
their business and trying to figure out what they are doing. At worst, it
is pompous theorizing about how to get the schmucks to do better.

We doubt that you are especially interested in economics, dear reader. We
know we are not. But we can't resist a good comedy...or a good opportunity
to point and giggle. We keep our eye on economists and politicians the way
children watch clowns; we can't wait to see them get whacked in the head
or trip over each other.

But what is amusing is also instructive. Are not clowns people too? Are
they not part of human life...human organization...and human economy?
Every one of them is driven by the same motors that power everyone else.
They want power...glory...money. But how do they get it? Can we not watch
politicians and economists and learn something about ourselves?

One of the many conceits of politicians and economists are that they are
somehow out of ordinary. They are godlike, or so they pretend, having no
other ambition but to make the world a better place. Neither drink, nor
meat, nor false witness cross their lips. They sweat for no material
gain...and know no lust - save for the betterment of all mankind. They
pass laws...they enact codes and regulations...they jiggle this lever and
turn another - as if they were the masters of the whole human race, rather
than mere parts of it themselves. Since they float above it all, they are
not subject to the normal temptations. The rest of us spend our whole
lives like animals - craving profits, mates, status, pride, love, and
money like a raccoon searching for a garbage pail without a lid. Unless we
are kept in tight cages, who knows what we will do?

That is why the tabloid press - especially in England - loves the stories
of the government ministers having affairs with their secretaries or
cheating on their income tax. Who doesn't like to see hypocrisy revealed
in public? It is as if the King himself had been caught with his pants
down; we gape...and see that he is human, just like the rest of us.

But thank God there are leaders! Thinkers! Theorists with their "isms" and
their rat wire...ready not merely to keep us from hurting one another, but
also to give us a sense of moral purpose. It is not enough that we should
each seek happiness in our own private way, we must Free the Sudetenland!
Abolish Poverty! Make the World Safe for Democracy! We must realize our
manifest destiny...and provide liebensraum [living space] for the German
people! Full employment! A minimum wage! No humbug left behind!

We bring this up only to laugh at it.

In the early 20th century, John Maynard Keynes came up with a new idea
about economics. The politicians loved it; Keynes explained how they could
meddle in private affairs on a grand scale - and, of course, make things
better. Keynes argued that a government could take the edge off a business
recession by making more credit available when money got tight...and by
spending itself to make up for the lack of spending on the part of
consumers and businessmen. Keynes suggested, whimsically, hiding bottles
of cash all around town, where boys might find them, spend the money, and
revive the economy.

The new idea caught on. Soon economists were advising all major
governments about how to implement the new "ism." It did not seem to
bother anyone that the new system was a fraud. Where would this new money
come from? And what made anyone think that the economists' judgment of
whether it made sense to spend or save was better than individuals? All
the Keynesians had done was to substitute their own guesses for the
private, personal, economic opinions of millions of ordinary citizens.
They had resorted to what Franz Oppenheimer called "political means,"
instead of allowing normal "economic means" to take their own course.

The economists wanted what everyone else wants - power, prestige, women
(except for Keynes himself, who preferred men). And there are only two
ways to get what you want in life, dear reader. There are honest means,
and dishonest ones. There are economic means, and there are political
means. There is persuasion...and there is force. There are civilized
ways...and barbaric ones. The economist is a harmless crank as long as he
is just peeping through the window. That is what we do here at The Daily
Reckoning. But when he undertakes to get people to do what he wants -
either by offering them money that is not his own...by defrauding them
with artificially low interest rates...or by printing up money that is not
backed by something of real value (such as gold)...he has crossed over the
dark side. He has moved to political means to get what he wants. He has
become a jackass.

Keynesian improvements were applied in the '20s - when Fed governor Ben
Strong decided to give the economy a little "coup de whiskey" - and later
in the '30s when the stockmarket was recovering from the hangover. The
results were predictably disastrous. And along came other economists with
their own bad ideas. Rare was the man, like Robert Lucas or Murray
Rothbard, who pointed out that you could not really improve economic
results with political means. If a national assembly could make people
rich simply by passing laws, we would all be billionaires, because
assemblies have passed a multitude of laws and seem capable of enacting
any piece of legislation brought before them. If laws could make people
wealthy, some assembly somewhere would have found the magic edicts -
simply by chance.

But instead of making them richer, each law makes them a little poorer.
Every time political means are used they interfere with the private,
civilized economic arrangements that actually get people what they want.
One man makes shoes. Another grows potatoes. The potato grower goes to the
cobbler to buy a pair of shoes. He must exchange two sacks of potatoes for
one pair of penny loafers. But then the meddlers show up and tell him he
must charge three sacks...so that he can pay one in "taxes," to the
meddlers themselves. And then he needs to put in an alarm system in his
shop, and buy a hardhat, and pay his helper minimum wage, and fill out
forms for all manner of laudable purposes. When the potato farmer finally
shows up at the cobbler's he is informed that the shoes will cost seven
sacks of potatoes! That is just what he has to charge in order to end up
with the same two sacks he needed to charge in the beginning. "No thanks,"
says the potato man, "At that price, I can't afford a pair of shoes."

What the potato grower needs, say the economists, is more money! The money
supply has failed to keep pace, they add. That was why they urged the
government to set up the Federal Reserve in the first place; they wanted a
stooge currency that would be ready to go along with their plans. Gold is
fine, they said, but it's anti-social. It resists new "isms" and drags its
feet on financing new social programs. Why, it is positively recalcitrant!
Clearly, when we face a war or a Great National Purpose we need money that
is willing to stand up and sign on. Gold malingers. Gold hesitates. Gold
is reluctant and reticent. Gold is fine as a private money. But what we
need is a source of public funding...a flexible, expandable national
currency...a political money that we can work with. We need a dollar that
is not linked to gold.

In the many years since the creation of the Federal Reserve system as
America's central bank, gold has remained as steadfast and immobile as
ever. An ounce of it today buys about the same amount of goods and
services as an ounce in 1913. But the dollar has gone along with every bit
of political gimcrackery that has come along - the war in Europe, the New
Deal, WWII, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the war on poverty, the war on
illiteracy, the New Frontier, the Great Society, Social Security,
Medicare, Medicaid, the War in Iraq, the war on terror...the list is long
and sordid. As a result, guess how much a dollar is worth today in
comparison to one in 1913? Five cents.

Keynesianism is a fraud. Supply-siderism is a con. The dollar itself is a
scam. All were developed by people with good intentions. But these good
intentions not only paved the road to Hell, they greased it. There was no
point putting on the brakes. Once underway, there was no stopping it.

Right now, the United States slides towards some sort of Hell. A
half-century of deceit has produced a nation that is ready to believe
anything...and go along with anything...provided it promises to make them
rich. They will be very disappointed when they discover that all the
political means they counted on - the phony money, the laws, the
regulations, and the wars - have made them poorer. That is when we will
really need cages...

"Nothing in nature is evil," said Marcus Aurelius. Keynes was human. Even
Adolf Hitler was a man, a part of nature himself. And the "Evil Empire,"
was it not created by men too, men who - like economists and politicians -
followed their own natural impulses? Adolf may have erred and strayed. But
he did so with the best of intentions; he thought he was building a better
world. And he had all the "reasons" you could ask for. He could argue all
day; "proving" that his plan was the best way forward.

Not that there weren't arguments on the other side. What were smart people
to do? People argued about Keynesianism for many years. Each side had good
points. One was convincing; the other was persuasive. It was like a couple
arguing in divorce court - the husband forgot to take out the trash and
knocked over a vase; the wife ran him over with the family car. "He had it
coming," she says.

What would an observer think? No amount of logic could help him. Both
parties made good points. All the judge could do was to fall back on his
own deep sense of right and wrong, of proportion...and good taste. "She
shouldn't have run him down," he says solomaniacally.

"Love the man, hate the sin," say the Baptist preachers. They have a
useful point. There's no point in hating Adolf, Josef, Ossama...or John
Maynard...or any of the other thousands of clowns who entertain, annoy and
murder us. They are God's creatures too, just like the rest of us. What
they did wrong was what they always do wrong...they all resorted to
political means, to get what they wanted.

We do not hate them; we just hope they get what they deserve. - Bill Bonner, The Daily Reckoning Copyright © 2000-2006 Agora Financial LLC. [See the Fair Use Notice, below.]

posted by George Thomas Kysor 1:08 AM

Friday, April 21, 2006

BOUND FOR CANAAN: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America [excerpt] 

As tobacco production expanded from twenty thousand pounds in 1619
to thirty-eight million pounds in 1700, and then tripled again by
the end of the eighteenth century, the demand for slave labor
steadily grew. Between 1680 and 1750, the number of black slaves
increased from about 7 percent to 44 percent of the population in
Virginia and from 17 percent to 61 percent in South Carolina, where
rice-growing in the coastal counties also lent itself to plantation
economics. Slavery was by no means confined to the South. The number
of black slaves in Connecticut grew from thirty in 1680 to fifteen
hundred in 1715, and eventually to more than sixty-five hundred on
the threshold of the Revolution. "The Negro Business is a great
object with us," Joseph Clay of Savannah, Georgia, wrote, in 1784.
"It is to the Trade of the Country as the Soul to the Body."

To be sure, commercial trade in all kinds of human beings was
commonplace in seventeenth-century England. Bristol, London, and
other ports exported large numbers of white indentured servants and
prisoners of war. In 1652, for instance, 270 Scots who had been
captured at the battle of Dunbar were put on the market and sold in
Boston. Shipping kidnapped children and adults was also a thriving
business. In 1617, a single agent, one William Thiene, exported 840
people, and in 1668 there were three ships at anchor in the Thames
full of kidnapped children. By the end of the century, however, all
other forms of the commerce in human flesh were dwarfed by the
African trade. Between 1680 and 1700 alone, three hundred thousand
slaves were shipped westward to the Americas in English vessels
alone. - Fergus M. Bordewich (via NONFICTION BOOK CLUB)

posted by George Thomas Kysor 8:36 PM

The Largest Biological Experiment Ever [excerpt] 

The Blood-Brain Barrier

The second effect that I want to focus on, which has been proven in the laboratory, should by itself have been enough to shut down this industry and should be enough to scare away anyone from ever using a cell phone again. I call it the "smoking gun" of cell phone experiments. Like most biological effects of microwave radiation, this has nothing to do with heating.

The brain is protected by tight junctions between adjacent cells of capillary walls, the so-called blood-brain barrier, which, like a border patrol, lets nutrients pass through from the blood to the brain, but keeps toxic substances out. Since 1988, researchers in the laboratory of a Swedish neurosurgeon, Leif Salford, have been running variations on this simple experiment: they expose young laboratory rats to either a cell phone or other source of microwave radiation, and later they sacrifice the animals and look for albumin in their brain tissue. Albumin is a protein that is a normal component of blood but that does not normally cross the blood-brain barrier. The presence of albumin in brain tissue is always a sign that blood vessels have been damaged and that the brain has lost some of its protection.

Here is what these researchers have found, consistently for 18 years: Microwave radiation, at doses equal to a cell phone's emissions, causes albumin to be found in brain tissue. A one-time exposure to an ordinary cell phone for just two minutes causes albumin to leak into the brain. In one set of experiments, reducing the exposure level by a factor of 1,000 actually increased the damage to the blood-brain barrier, showing that this is not a dose-response effect and that reducing the power will not make wireless technology safer. And finally, in research published in June 2003, a single two-hour exposure to a cell phone, just once during its lifetime, permanently damaged the blood-brain barrier and, on autopsy 50 days later, was found to have damaged or destroyed up to 2 percent of an animal's brain cells, including cells in areas of the brain concerned with learning, memory and movement.1 Reducing the exposure level by a factor of 10 or 100, thereby duplicating the effect of wearing a headset, moving a cell phone further from your body, or standing next to somebody else's phone, did not appreciably change the results! Even at the lowest exposure, half the animals had a moderate to high number of damaged neurons.

The implications for us? Two minutes on a cell phone disrupts the blood-brain barrier, two hours on a cell phone causes permanent brain damage, and secondhand radiation may be almost as bad. The blood-brain barrier is the same in a rat and a human being. - Arthur Firstenberg (via Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter # 258)

posted by George Thomas Kysor 3:38 PM

Thursday, April 20, 2006

The "Facts" From Our Government Are Nothing Short of Outrageous Fraud [excerpt] 

Let me ask you this.

If Enron, WorldCom and Global Crossing can fake their revenues... if Shell Petroleum and OPEC see fit to lie about their total oil reserves... why wouldn't politicians, who get appointed, elected and re-elected based on economic performance, see fit to lie their way through office too?

And they do.

Take unemployment. If it's low, that looks good. And right now, we're supposed to believe it stands at "5.5%." Problem is, changes under both Clinton and Bush have reinvented the way we calculate those numbers... to Washington's advantage.

For one, they don't include the ex-workers who can't find new jobs. After six months of searching, those unemployed job seekers just fall off the books. They go "invisible." About 5 million unemployed Americans have now earned "invisible" status.

If you use the real statistics to calculate unemployment, the way we used to calculate it back in 1980, the real unemployment rate is a much more devastating 12.5%.

That's worse than the unemployment rate in China, France, Germany or Italy. And about four times the unemployment rate in Mexico!

The same is true for the real inflation rate.

I showed you earlier that official inflation is about 4.7%. That's high, compared with other industrialized countries. But the real rates are much higher. If you annualize the inflation rates of the last available quarter in 2005, you're talking price inflation of an incredible 10%.

It's like living in the 1970s all over again. Only this time, there's no Paul Volcker to kick-start the Fed and save the day. Meanwhile, if you kick out the government calculations and do the real math on America's GDP, real growth of the economy is precisely 0%.

Not at all the picture Washington wants us to believe.

It's no wonder most Americans - especially investors - just aren't ready for the fiscal winter that's waiting ahead. Then, of course, you've got the disastrous government policy of so-called "hedonic pricing."

This is a mirage of false statistics that lets the government multiply technology spending by many billions of dollars... and then add that to the country's bottom line. On what basis? Simply because, they say, newer computers are faster than older ones.

Here's how it works.

Let's say U.S. businesses just sank $10 billion in actual dollars to buy new computers. That can actually get posted, according to the government, as something like $80-90 billion. Because of the hypothetical productivity that's going to add, somewhere down the road, to America's bottom line.

Could you imagine trying to collect a paycheck based on that kind of claim? It's like buying the top-of-the-line exercise bike and pretending that not using that will get you in better shape than the bargain bike you never used either.

The government does the same with software. Over $300 billion in software spending by U.S. companies gets counted as an investment instead of a plain business expense. And then that gets folded into GDP growth too.

All this made-up technology growth alone is calculated as an incredible 40% of the growth of America's GDP. Even though the entire computer and software industry is, in reality, just 2% of the U.S. economy and provides just 4% of America's jobs.

Rejiggering numbers in Washington is easy. Because the regulators work for the syndicate that's cooking the books. So the Feds are free to invent phony jobs, phony spending and now... a phony recovery. - Dr. Richebächer was one of the first brave economists to expose these kinds of government lies. But this deception today, he says, has been the largest and most insidious of them all.

posted by George Thomas Kysor 6:56 PM

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Another 9/11 Video 

posted by George Thomas Kysor 12:23 AM

Monday, April 17, 2006

Marla: Mission Continued 

It's been one year since a suicide car bomber killed Marla Ruzicka and her colleague Faiz Ali Salim as they were driving along the Baghdad airport road. The date is marked on my calendar. Funny how these scribbled reminders can affect you. You think it's not a big deal -- just a date on the calendar -- and then the day rolls around and you are visited anew by the gravity of the loss.

Marla, of course, has not been forgotten. All year, she's been popping up, making her presence felt in different ways. She was posthumously given a Bridge of Peace award from Global Village Foundation; a fellowship was endowed in her name at Brown University; she even has her own Wikipedia entry, a fact she might have found hilarious. Recently I opened a new collection of photographs called "Unembedded," and there on the title page was a dedication to Marla and Faiz.

"Unembedded" is the visual chronicle of a world with which Marla was intimately familiar: wartime Iraq. There are photos of a father holding the hand of his dying child, bereaved women praying at a mosque, children playing in the street in front of an American tank. There are also scenes of people sharing a meal, dancing at a wedding, swimming in the Euphrates river. Even in a ruined country, people get on with their lives.

A doctor quoted in "Unembedded" says, "War wounds are always multiple wounds." Iraq's war wounds have multiplied in the year since Marla died. The occupation continues, the country still lacks an established government, and civilians are being injured and killed in greater numbers than ever. Abductions are common, mass graves have been unearthed, Iraqi journalists and politicans have been assassinated. Dozens of bodies showing signs of torture are found almost daily on the streets of Baghdad. U.S. troops are still dying, getting maimed, coming home irrevocably damaged. Reconstruction efforts are hampered by the inability to provide security for workers ... the grim litany goes on and on.

I am hard-pressed to find any glimmers of hope in this picture. Yet none of it, I suspect, would have deterred Marla. She had one goal: to lessen suffering. She did this doggedly, radiantly, personally. In an op-ed she wrote shortly before she died, she explained the importance of counting the dead and injured civilians: "A number is important not only to quantify the cost of the war, but to me, each number is also a story of someone whose hopes, dreams and potential will never be realized, and who left behind a family."

This was not just empty rhetoric. Marla wanted to humanize the rising numbers of war, to give each victim back their name and face and record their story. She knew that people are moved, not by abstractions, but by the stories of real people. If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough, said photojournalist Robert Capa. Marla's pictures were all close-ups.

After her death, Marla's family and friends resolved to continue her work -- a task they have undertaken with a passion and tenaciousness that would have made Marla proud. They have turned CIVIC (Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict), the NGO Marla singlehandedly founded in 2003, into a functioning organization with a board of directors and two full-time staffers: Associate Director Marla Bertagnolli (known as Marla B), and Executive Director Sarah Holewinski, who made her first trip to Iraq in March.

I spoke with Holewinski by telephone not long after she returned. Her experience in Iraq, she said, was both exhilarating and exhausting. "Humanitarian work is not what it was when Marla started CIVIC," she told me. "There are places in Iraq I cannot go and meet with the families, because they would be targets and I would be targeted. But there's also this sense of hope and optimism, because there are so many people who want to help."

Holewinski, like Marla, is dedicated to keeping the faces of civilian casualties front and center in the hopes of making it impossible for us to ignore the human consequences of our country's actions in Iraq. On CIVIC's website you can read about some of these people; 13-year-old Marwa, for instance, who was badly injured when a coalition shell struck her home in 2003, killing her mother. CIVIC arranged to have her flown to Los Angeles for reconstructive surgery at UCLA, which agreed to cover the costs. There are accounts of other Iraqis, too, whose stories have less hopeful outcomes.

"The stories make the difference for us," said Holewinski. "We're in this work because we understand that every one of those numbers -- no matter what you believe, whether the casualty count is 30,000 or 100,000 -- every one is a life. People come to this work because they get those stories and that makes sense to them."

The effectiveness of such stories was behind one of Marla's greatest triumphs. With the support of Sen. Patrick Leahy, Marla successfully lobbied Congress to create a fund for victims of war. Currently $38 million has been allocated to help the families of civilians harmed by U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Marla Ruzicka Iraqi War Victims' Fund, as it was named after her death, is administered through USAID and is unique in its emphasis on income-generating projects; it pays medical bills, rebuilds homes, helps Iraqis start new businesses or rebuild ones that have been destroyed. CIVIC has been instrumental in helping distribute the aid money.

CIVIC follows Marla's pragmatic strategy of steering clear of the antipathy between antiwar activists and the military. It was not her practice to denounce the military but to insistently pressure them to consider the welfare of ordinary citizens in their operations, and to make that a stated policy. She persuaded people whose help she needed that the goal of protecting the lives of the innocent was not partisan, but an objective everyone could share.

"You would think people would be at odds, but they're not," Sarah Holewinski said. "If you focus solely on the human costs of war, then everyone -- the media, the military, government officials, activist organizations -- everyone has a stake in this, everyone wants to do their part."

Someone made a short video portrait of Marla that was shown at one of her memorials. Watching it, I was struck by how frequently she touches people, both friends and total strangers. She kissed, she hugged spontaneously, she reached for people's hands, held their children on her lap. She doled out love unstintingly, and almost universally, people dropped their guard and responded to her.

Raed Jarrar, who went door to door with Marla collecting data on civilian deaths in Iraq, remembered watching her wade into a crowd of Iraqi men, women and children, shaking every hand she could reach, and saying, "Sorry ... sorry... sorry we invaded your country... sorry we killed your people."

"I was sure no one understood what she was saying," Jarrar wrote, "but people knew she was being nice and friendly. It was a nice move to have more personal contact with Iraqis at the time that any foreigner was a big mystery. It was important to tell Iraqis that not all Americans come with guns, some of them come with smiles and hopes to make friends."

Holewinski says the country's communications infrastructure is so deteriorated that some of the Iraqis she met who had known Marla had not heard of her death. "To tell them and see the look on their face -- it's another tragedy for them, and they're devastated," she said. "When they see that CIVIC is carrying on her work, there are so many offers of help, they want to help. They know that this is the American success in Iraq -- helping the families and knowing that we're going to do everything we can."

I asked her how she kept her spirits up in the face of all the suffering she witnessed doing humanitarian work. She admitted she had felt a little dejected on the flight home. "When you go to a war zone it's really easy to come back and think, this is so depressing and it's never going to get better." She paused. "Then, you meet someone like Marla or the Iraqis who really want to help their people, and that one word of encouragement means that you're going to go on, and that exponentially multiplies."

In the memorial he wrote about her on Salon, Phillip Robertson called Marla an "enemy of war," a phrase I cannot get out of my head. New York Times correspondent Chris Hedges used the same phrase in the conclusion of his address to the Rockford College graduating class of 2003: "Friendship -- or, let me say love -- is the most potent enemy of war."

Hedges was heckled throughout his speech and nearly booed offstage, for to suggest during a time of war that love is stronger than brute force, that people should help instead of hate is a radical idea. (It's also the most basic tenet of Christianity, but never mind.) Marla embodied this concept, and so did Margaret Hassan and Tom Fox, to pick two other aid workers killed in Iraq over the course of this war.

After Hassan was abducted and murdered in 2004, Tom Fox wrote in his blog that "the Quran teaches that an innocent person who is killed travels as quickly as does light to the gates of Paradise." Marla left us at the speed of light. But she lives on in so many ways: in the Iraqi War Victims fund for which she fought so hard, in the determination and love of the staff and volunteers of CIVIC, and in the hearts of all the people who were moved by her example to do good. She had a genius for inspiring ordinary people to do extraordinary things. Marla didn't want to save the world, she just hoped to make it "a little bit better." And she has. - Tai Moses, AlterNet © 2006 Independent Media Institute. [See the Fair Use Notice, below.]

posted by George Thomas Kysor 11:09 PM

BOND MARKET BOZOS 

I notice with dark dismay that the horrid U.S. Federal Reserve is now back
on track to destroy the dollar as soon as it can, as evidenced by the fact
that Total Fed Credit shot up by $6.4 billion, last week. With the current
insanely low fractional-reserve ratio of the banks set by the Fed
(literally zero for new deposits), this means that the banks can create
(let me re-check the calculations again) 64 zillion-kajillion dollars out
of thin air, all of which devalues the rest of the dollars already in
existence.

At this point, I notice that I am getting kind of numb to these constant,
insane increases in Total Fed Credit, seeing that it really started
exploding way back in 1997 - although $6.4 billion still has the family
kind of edgy that I am going to go berserk again, like I usually do, and
they are all cowering under the table. But, the thing that really got me
up and sprinting out to the Mogambo Bunker Of Screaming Panic And Fear
(MBOSPAF) is that there is a new, ominous wrinkle in all of this U.S.
Federal Reserve monetary insanity. It's an obscure, usually low-figure
account at the Fed labeled "Other F.R. Assets." Suddenly, out of the blue
it registered a whopping increase of $4.3 billion, last week! It ain't
bonds and it ain't cash, things a bank normally gobbles up. So, what could
the Fed be accumulating - and why?

As I am slamming the door shut and arming the Mogambo Intruder Intercept
System (MIIS), I am thinking to myself that I am not sure what in the hell
that Fed is up to, but it is getting really, really weird. As a guy who is
weird, I certainly know what I am talking about when it comes to weird,
although I will probably be the only one in the police lineup, standing
there with all the rest of the creepy (and smelly) scum of the Earth ("Hi,
Mogambo!" "Hi, Bob! Yo, Willie!"), when the cops soothingly say to the
witness behind the two-way mirror, "Do you recognize the weird, lying
little pervert, ma'am?" I will start yelling, "Weird? You want weird? Then
get that weird old bat up here with me, because the Federal Reserve is
destroying her money and yet, she is down here complaining about me
screaming at her to wake up and prepare to die a horrible economic death
because of it! Now that's weird!"

And speaking of weird, lying little perverts (being gratuitously
disrespectful and nasty), even foreign central banks are tiptoeing back in
the game of trying to keep the dollar from collapsing into nothingness,
and they also increased their holdings of U.S. debt by another $1.7
billion, last week. Not much, considering their long record, but enough to
show polite interest.

Of course, we can always count on the loathsome Congress to sell us down
the river, and so it comes as no surprise that the U.S. Treasury gross
public debt has ballooned ("BoooOOOOooing!") to an obscene $8.402
trillion, up $31 billion in just the last 10 days, and up $232 billion
since January 1,2006! It will get worse and worse, as the U.S. Treasury
feverishly prints up and sells more and more bonds so that Congress can
spend, spend, spend us into the poorhouse - further crippling the dollar.

So, I am laughing in Loud Mogambo Scorn (LMS) at not only bond market
bozos who are still buying bonds even as the prices fall and keep falling,
but also the complete clods who are buying stocks at the same time, even
as central banks are tightening, the Congress is spending outrageous
amounts of borrowed money, the dollar is falling, but also (and I have to
rub my eyes in disbelief) even when crude oil is nearing $70 a barrel!
What kind of complete idiots are these jerks? I'll tell you who: idiot
Americans who keep plowing their money into mutual funds and retirement
plans loaded with non-gold equities and bonds, thinking that portfolio
managers are some kind of magical wizards who will produce gains when
nobody else can.

I mean, these bond market chumps are standing around, scratching their
thick heads and muttering, "Huh? What? Huh? What happened?" These
bond-buying morons are losing money and yet, are still intent on locking
their money up for up to 30 years by buying long bonds so that they can
get tiny, less-than-inflation yields! What kind of stupidity is that? And
when yields continue to rise and rise (and they will, as all central banks
are starting to react to the inflation that is rising in their countries
as a result of all of this creating of excess money and credit), they will
get exactly what they deserve for their stupidity: really huge losses.

The bad news is that this, as I keep yelling about, is your money that
they are managing, and all the bond portfolio managers will get for their
laughable incompetence are huge salaries and outlandish bonuses. But, they
can't hold back the tides, and millions of people are going to get whacked
for it. It's like Mother Nature said: "It's not smart to be so childishly
trusting!"

Their bigger losses may come sooner than they think! In a GATA (Gold
Anti-Trust Action Committee) dispatch of an article in the Financial
Times, they have forwarded the news that says, "The U.S. dollar extended
losses in European morning trade on Tuesday amid a call from a Chinese
politician for China to stop buying U.S. Treasuries. Cheng Siwei, a vice
chief of China's National People's Congress, was quoted as saying that
'China can stop buying dollar-denominated bonds, and gradually reduce its
holdings of U.S. bonds'."

The central banks are (and have been) doing everything they can to prevent
the dollar from rolling over, but that may soon be history. Paul van Eeden
writes, "Mr. Hu Jintao, the Chinese President, is scheduled to visit
Washington later this month while the United States continues to put
pressure on China to let its currency appreciate against the dollar. It
seems China is going to comply: In December Mr. Yu Yongding, who is a
member of the monetary policy advisory committee to the People's Bank of
China, said that China should weaken the link between the yuan (renminbi)
and the U.S. dollar."

If you notice that you heart has stopped and people around you are
furiously dialing 911, then congratulations! You correctly realize that
this means that if China starts reducing its holdings of U.S. debt and
assets, or even slow the pace of buying more, then who is going to finance
our current account deficit and the federal budget deficit? Net result?
The dollar goes lower and things that we import (like oil and nearly
everything else) will cost more - much more.

The good news about a falling dollar is, they say (and as a "Mogambo Heads
Up (MHU)," they are wrong), that this lower dollar thing will make U.S.
exports cheaper on the world market. So, the trade deficit will
automatically shrink because we are exporting more and importing less.
Hahaha! Convulsed as I am with laughter, I am almost too incapacitated to
tell you that when you have been around capitalist swine as long as I have
(with all their precious "rules" about coming to work on time (every day!)
and not harassing the secretaries and blah, blah, blah), as soon as these
greedy corporations find that their prices are lower than the
competitor's, they will raise prices! I've seen it a million times!

So, we will have the worst of both worlds: higher import prices and higher
domestic prices! Nice work, Federal Reserve jerks!

And speaking of GATA, Alex at Leg2Capital.com shows that not only was he
was paying attention in physics class while me and my stupid hoodlum
friends were poking each other with pencils in the back of the room and
giggling about how we wish we were drunk (or more drunk), but that he can
extrapolate classical physics to the eye-popping rise in the price of
gold.

"For every action," he starts off, quoting Newton, "there is an equal and
opposite reaction." Then he takes that and says that the rise in gold is
thus foreordained. "It's now obvious the central banks have done a
terrific job of suppressing the gold price. It's now out there for
everyone to see who cares to look at the information (thanks to Bill
Murphy and GATA). Therefore, an extraordinary suppression of the Gold
price well below the inflation-adjusted price of $1800 has created an
equal and opposite reaction of an extraordinary rise. Hence the move on
the gold chart." And before you think that it is too late to get in on
some of this action in gold, he says not to worry because the big moves
are "yet to come."

And in talking about Newtonian physics and "big moves," Robert Prechter,
of Elliott Wave fame, says that the recent huge (>40%) losses in Middle
Eastern stock markets is just prolog. "This year the U.S. stock market is
shaping up to drop at least as fast. Generally when stocks levitate into a
market cycle, they make up for it by crashing. In 1929, stocks rose for
2.5 years into the 2.7-year cycle. Then they lost 50 percent of their
value in 2 1/2 months. In 1987, stocks rose for 3.1 years into the
3.3-year cycle. Then they lost 40 percent of their value in 7 weeks."

If you think you got the guts to weather a 40% drop in your portfolio,
maybe you ought to re-think that optimistic assessment when he goes on to
say, "But given that the bear market is of Grand Supercycle degree, the
largest in nearly 300 years, the coming drop should dwarf both of those
crashes."

What happens in crashes? People run to gold in sheer panic. Peter Spina,
at the GoldForecaster.com, says that the time to buy gold is still here,
and that they have "elevated the gold price target to $720 an ounce." This
is their anticipated price before anything crashes!

Until next time,

The Mogambo Guru
for The Daily Reckoning

Editor's Note: Richard Daughty is general partner and COO for Smith
Consultant Group, serving the financial and medical communities, and the
editor of The Mogambo Guru economic newsletter - an avocational exercise
to heap disrespect on those who desperately deserve it.

The Mogambo Guru is quoted frequently in Barron's, The Daily Reckoning and
other fine publications. If you're inclined to read more, you'll find the
whole Mogambo here.
Copyright © 2000-2006 Agora Financial LLC. [See the Fair Use Notice, below.]

posted by George Thomas Kysor 10:47 PM

Sunday, April 16, 2006

Click on image to enlarge 

TIME.com Copyright © 2005 Time Inc. [See the Fair Use Notice, below.]

posted by George Thomas Kysor 9:34 PM

Physicist says thermite with sulfer felled WTC 

A Brigham Young University physicist said he now believes an incendiary substance called thermite, bolstered by sulfur, was used to generate exceptionally hot fires at the World Trade Center on 9/11, causing the structural steel to fail and the buildings to collapse.
"It looks like thermite with sulfur added, which really is a very clever idea," Steven Jones, professor of physics at BYU, told a meeting of the Utah Academy of Science, Arts and Letters at Snow College Friday.
The government requires standard explosives to contain tag elements enabling them to be traced back to their manufacturers. But no tags are required in aluminum and iron oxide, the materials used to make thermite, he said. Nor, he said, are tags required in sulfur.
Jones is co-chairman, with James H. Fetzer, a distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, a group of college faculty members who believe conspirators other than pilots of the planes were directly involved in bringing down New York's Trade Towers.
The group, which Jones said has 200 members, maintains a Web site at www.st911.org. A 40-page paper by Jones, along with other peer-reviewed and non-reviewed academic papers and videos are posted on the site.
Last year, Jones presented various arguments for his theory that explosives or incendiary devices were planted in the Trade Towers, and in WTC 7, a smaller building in the Trade Center complex, and that those materials, not planes crashing into the buildings, caused the buildings to collapse.
At that time, he mentioned thermite as the possible explosive or incendiary agent. But Friday, he said he is increasingly convinced that thermite and sulfur were the root causes of the 9/11 disaster.
He told college professors and graduate students from throughout Utah gathered for the academy meeting that while almost no fire, even one ignited by jet fuel, can cause structural steel to fail, the combination of thermite and sulfur "slices through steel like a hot knife through butter."
He ticked off several pieces of evidence for his thermite fire theory:
First, he said, video showed a yellow, molten substance splashing off the side of the south Trade Tower about 50 minutes after an airplane hit it and a few minutes before it collapsed. Government investigators ruled out the possibility of melting steel being the source of the material because of the unlikelihood of steel melting. The investigators said the molten material must have been aluminum from the plane.
But, said Jones, molten aluminum is silvery. It never turns yellow. The substance observed in the videos "just isn't aluminum," he said. But, he said, thermite can cause steel to melt and become yellowish.
Second, he cited video pictures showing white ash rising from the south tower near the dripping, liquefied metal. When thermite burns, Jones said, it releases aluminum-oxide ash. The presence of both yellow-white molten iron and aluminum oxide ash "are signature characteristics of a thermite reaction," he said.
Another item of evidence, Jones said, is the fact that sulfur traces were found in structural steel recovered from the Trade Towers. Jones quoted the New York Times as saying sulfidization in the recovered steel was "perhaps the deepest mystery uncovered in the (official) investigation." But, he said, sulfidization fits the theory that sulfur was combined with thermite to make the thermite burn even hotter than it ordinarily would.
Jones said a piece of building wreckage had a gray substance on the outside that at one point had obviously been a dripping molten metal or liquid. He said that after thermite turns steel or iron into a molten form, and the metal hardens, it is gray.
He added that pools of molten metal were found beneath both trade towers and the 47-story WTC 7. That fact, he said, was never discussed in official investigation reports.
And even though WTC 7 was not connected to the Trade Towers — in fact, there was another building between it and the towers —and even though it was never hit by a plane, it collapsed. That suggests, he said, that it came down because a thermite fire caused its structural steel to fail.
Jones said his studies are confined to physical causes of the collapses, and he doesn't like to speculate about who might have entered the buildings and placed thermite and sulfur. But he said 10 to 20 people "in the know," plus other people who didn't know what they were doing but did what they were told, could have placed incendiary packages over several weeks. - Suzanne Dean © 2006 Deseret News Publishing Company [See the Fair Use Notice, below.]

posted by George Thomas Kysor 6:14 PM

5 Things To Expect Dick Cheney To Do As Global Warming Intensifies 

[Adapted from my contribution to Duck!, a new humorous anthology of advice for Dick Cheney]

If climate turns out to be the weapon of mass destruction Vice President Cheney should have been worrying about, he has a problem. Let’s say in the near future hurricanes, nor'easters, dust bowls, floods, crop failures, ice storms and tornadoes are ruining the economy, and the voters are blaming Cheney because he and President Bush dismissed the science behind the threat, ridiculed conservation (one of the easiest ways to immediately lessen greenhouse gas emissions) as a “civic virtue,” and were champions of the fossil fuel industry. Cheney may think he has big business on his side, but even before Katrina, many CEOs began joining the tree huggers. Even the evangelicals, whose leaders went enviro and called for action. So when the weather changes, what will Cheney do?

1. Blame the Democrats. This is easy, it's what he always does, and they usually don't fight back. Cheney will say that he and Bush inherited the problem from the Clinton administration (not mentioning that it was a Republican- controlled Congress that torpedoed action) and that the Bush Administration actually cut oil use by the end of its second term, while it steadily went up during the Clinton years (expect him to gloss over the fact that supply disruptions due to civil war in the Middle East and a worldwide depression caused the decline).

2. He will claim that no one could have seen it coming. That strategy worked for a bit after Katrina--until those irritating videotape and emails started surfacing. And the truth is, it's entirely possible that Cheney didn't see it coming: it's unlikely that any of the “experts” his administration consulted, ranging from science fiction writer Michael Crichton to the paid lackeys of the coal industry, mentioned that it might be a problem. (Don't expect him to acknowledge that the entire scientific establishment had been warning of the threat for fifteen years.)

3. He will argue that the Kyoto Treaty would not have helped, and that he and Bush were engaged in a search for the real way to deal with the problem, one that includes India and China. This one is tricky-smart. It's true that Kyoto is vastly inadequate to the scale of the threat, but it could be made stronger. On the other hand, he will have to finesse that India and China are never going to join an effort on climate change unless the U.S., with 25 percent of world emissions, shows leadership on the issue.

4) He will say the crazy weather is natural. Why not? That's what the naysayers have been saying whenever an ice shelf collapses. It's unlikely that Cheney will mention that CO2, which has tracked temperature for millions of years, is now at higher levels than its been since homo sapiens evolved (better for him to avoid evolution anyway).

5) Expect him to move to Canada. Washington will have a climate like Khartoum, and Vancouver will be the new San Diego. - Eugene Linden © Eugene Linden. [See the Fair Use Notice, below.]

posted by George Thomas Kysor 3:17 PM

Saturday, April 15, 2006

The Real Nature of Offshoring 

One can blithely equate offshoring with happy consumers and expect the same to continue, but when one takes into account the nitty-gritty conditions actually affecting the results of offshoring, in the present circumstance, then, I believe, the results of offshoring will be seen much differently.

At the end of the twentieth century the inhabitants of the USA were, in large part, enjoying a very high standard of living compared to those in China and India - a very large disparity, indeed! So, what happens when those vast hordes in China and India begin to compete with the much higher paid people in the USA? What else but a leveling of the standards of living because, when wages level, the prices of imports will no longer be cheap. Of course, only when the standards of living reach parity can the American standard of living stop decreasing.

This leveling is now taking place (although conventional economic statistics may indicate otherwise). The living standards of China & India are increasing and the living standard of the USA is decreasing and, at a certain point in time, the twain shall meet. Hopefully, after that point, the living standard of the USA will raise or at least level off.

I think that if one takes conditions as they presently are, then it is apparent that the timelines will proceed thusly:

1) For three reasons (vast populations, very low standards of living, & rapid industrialization) the very low prices of goods and services from China & India will incrementally increase, along with their standards of living, but only at a very slow rate.

2) For converse reasons (comparatively small population, very high standard of living, & many industries already offshored) USA wages, and hence the standard of living, will incrementally decrease at a very fast rate.

Although the point at which the two timelines reach parity is not magical, it is, I think, a convenient place to consider that at that point the USA standard of living might start to increase or at least to level off.

My guess is that the duration of this economic depression in the USA will be at least several years if not much longer.

posted by George Thomas Kysor 2:45 PM

Friday, April 14, 2006

(via email from HJ)

posted by George Thomas Kysor 8:31 PM

The Sidewinder video 

By independently controlling the rotation of each wheel, the vehicle has the ability of travelling in any direction. The Airtrax wheel system can rotate in its own footprint or make 90 or 45 degree turns or it can go sideways without turning at all. (via Rocketboom)

posted by George Thomas Kysor 2:00 PM

Human Clock 

(via Rocketboom)

posted by George Thomas Kysor 1:25 PM

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Porn star's offer to Bin Laden 

Italy's most famous porn star Cicciolina has offered herself to Osama Bin Laden.

The 55-year-old actress said it was about time somebody tackled the terrorist and claimed she could be just the woman for the job.

Speaking at an erotic fair in Bucharest, Romania, Cicciolina said: "It is time someone did something about Bin Laden, and I am ready to do it.

"I am ready to make a deal, he can have me in exchange for an end to his tyranny. My breasts have only ever helped people while Bin Laden has killed thousands of innocent victims."

The blonde porn star, whose real name is Anna Ilona Staller, pointed out that Bin Laden could learn from Saddam Hussein's mistakes.

In the 1990s she offered herself to Saddam Hussein if he gave up dictatorship of Iraq, and added that if he had taken up her offer "who knows what might have happened." - Ananova

posted by George Thomas Kysor 5:40 PM

Strike the Root

posted by George Thomas Kysor 4:03 PM

Falluja April 2004 [the aftermath video] 

Pieces of skull and hair are embedded in a wall from the bombing of Swad Ahamad Jasem, 32 and her four children.

During the first (25-day) siege in April 2004 of Falluja, 2,847 civilians were wounded and 731 died according to statistics from the Falluja general hospital. - Toshikum Doi

posted by George Thomas Kysor 11:46 AM

Monday, April 10, 2006

The Real Conundrum [about Greenspan] 

Hello Joel,

For me the biggest conundrum is understanding Greenspan the man. How did he change so dramatically over the last forty or so years? In 1967, I think it was, he wrote his paper on gold and economic freedom and said that inflation was an insidious tax that only a gold standard could prevent. Then in 2000 to 2005 he prints money like there was no tomorrow - to the point that debts can no longer be repaid with money of similar purchasing power.

I believe the [listing M3 is now discontinued] M3 money stock, mentioned in almost every Economics Text ever written, went from about $4 trillion in 1995 to about $10 trillion in 2005. How does he justify the extremes of his thinking? Which one does he really believe in, Gold and Economic Freedom, or yet something different?

Cheers,
Chris K
Orinda, CA - Rude Awakening April 10, 2006

posted by George Thomas Kysor 4:49 PM

Confederate States of America, the movie 

posted by George Thomas Kysor 9:09 AM

Sunday, April 09, 2006

The Century of the Self 

Politicians and planners came to believe Freud's underlying premise - that deep within all human beings were dangerous and irrational desires and fears. They were convinced that it was the unleashing of these instincts that had led to the barbarism of Nazi Germany.

Sigmund Freud's daughter, Anna, and his nephew, Edward Bernays, provided the centrepiece philosophy. The US government, big business, and the CIA used their ideas to develop techniques to manage and control the minds of the American people. - Adam Curtis [Part One, Part Two, Part Three, & Part Four]

posted by George Thomas Kysor 3:54 PM

Stop a U.S. nuclear attack on Iran! 

A 10-minute movie, discussing why the US is likely to use nuclear weapons in a confrontation with Iran, and how to prevent it from happening. - UCSD public service page

"President Bush said to all of us: 'I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, "George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan." And I did, and then God would tell me, "George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq …" And I did. And now, again, I feel God's words coming to me, "Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East." And by God I'm gonna do it.'" So I sit back and wonder. What will God say next? - drowningfish [in digg comments]

posted by George Thomas Kysor 12:19 PM

Victor the Budgie [This brings new meaning to the phrase, "A little bird told me..."] 

My name is Ryan Reynolds and I have a one-of a kind parrot story that I would like to share with you. It is about a budgerigar named Victor who was the first parrot in the world to prove beyond a doubt that he could speak in conversational language. Victor was only about 8 weeks old when I brought him home from the pet shop. From the beginning he was an extraordinary learner. He could say the alphabet all the way through and repeat many nursery rhymes and verses at less than one year old. Towards two years, his talking capabilities were so good, I started a website and began posting his recordings. After a while I noticed that he was not just mimicking, but talking in context. Late in 2000, I began to keep a weekly journal which updated people who came to his site on his progress. I wanted to prove to the world that parrots could communicate and talk in context. I believed Victor's recordings would do that. Due to the time I spent trying to understand him better, and his willingness to learn and be recorded, his communication developed at an extremely fast pace. He proved that he could not only talk in context but was talented in other areas as well. Sadly, Victor became ill and died in March of 2001. After his death I have spent many hours analyzing his remaining recordings and improving the site in the hope that the scientific community will not ignore this case study and recognize it as valuable research.

Some people may not believe this is possible so I have presented this information in the most reliable way I know; audio and video. Victor's sites consist of four other sites, with several hundred pages of text and audio files. Each one of his recordings has something different in it to discover about parrot intelligence. After Victor died, I continued working with his mate and three other budgies. They have also shown similar aptitudes for using context. Victor had passed on much of his knowledge to his mate Betty. She in turn passed some of it on to her new companions. I have also posted many recordings on a separate site just for them. Although their recordings are not as clear and remarkable as Victor's, they show they are using conversational language as well.

Most people find Victor's recordings easier to understand as they adapt to his budgie accent. Budgies are not like most parrots. They seldom sound like their trainers. They can talk exceptionally fast and their voices are so small they usually have to be made louder to hear all of what they are saying. When you are listening to them, you may have to play them several times, section by section to understand them. However, I believe it to be well worth your time as you will be surprised at how intelligent they are. - Ryan Reynolds [See also this and this.] Copyright © April, 2001, 2002 Ryan Reynolds [See the Fair Use Notice, below.]
(via Sapphyre's answer 5 of Undecided Question: "talking parakeets?" at Yahoo!Answers.)

Buddy- This one is a little hard to hear but Buddy is trying to get the dog to speak and guess what? He does! http://brg.homestead.com/other/Buddy.mov - The BRG Community Community Forum Index

posted by George Thomas Kysor 1:03 AM

Saturday, April 08, 2006

The Iran Plans 

The new mission for the combat troops is a product of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s long-standing interest in expanding the role of the military in covert operations, which was made official policy in the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review, published in February. Such activities, if conducted by C.I.A. operatives, would need a Presidential Finding and would have to be reported to key members of Congress.

The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups. The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.

American and European intelligence agencies, and the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.), agree that Iran is intent on developing the capability to produce nuclear weapons. But there are widely differing estimates of how long that will take, and whether diplomacy, sanctions, or military action is the best way to prevent it. Iran insists that its research is for peaceful use only, in keeping with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and that it will not be delayed or deterred.

There is a growing conviction among members of the United States military, and in the international community, that President Bush’s ultimate goal in the nuclear confrontation with Iran is regime change. Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has challenged the reality of the Holocaust and said that Israel must be “wiped off the map.” Bush and others in the White House view him as a potential Adolf Hitler, a former senior intelligence official said. “That’s the name they’re using. They say, ‘Will Iran get a strategic weapon and threaten another world war?’ ”

A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon said that Bush was “absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb” if it is not stopped. He said that the President believes that he must do “what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do,” and “that saving Iran is going to be his legacy.”

One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.” He added, “I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, ‘What are they smoking?’ ”

The rationale for regime change was articulated in early March by Patrick Clawson, an Iran expert who is the deputy director for research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and who has been a supporter of President Bush. “So long as Iran has an Islamic republic, it will have a nuclear-weapons program, at least clandestinely,” Clawson told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 2nd. “The key issue, therefore, is: How long will the present Iranian regime last?”

When I spoke to Clawson, he emphasized that “this Administration is putting a lot of effort into diplomacy.” However, he added, Iran had no choice other than to accede to America’s demands or face a military attack. Clawson said that he fears that Ahmadinejad “sees the West as wimps and thinks we will eventually cave in. We have to be ready to deal with Iran if the crisis escalates.” Clawson said that he would prefer to rely on sabotage and other clandestine activities, such as “industrial accidents.” But, he said, it would be prudent to prepare for a wider war, “given the way the Iranians are acting. This is not like planning to invade Quebec.”

One military planner told me that White House criticisms of Iran and the high tempo of planning and clandestine activities amount to a campaign of “coercion” aimed at Iran. “You have to be ready to go, and we’ll see how they respond,” the officer said. “You have to really show a threat in order to get Ahmadinejad to back down.” He added, “People think Bush has been focussed on Saddam Hussein since 9/11,” but, “in my view, if you had to name one nation that was his focus all the way along, it was Iran.” (In response to detailed requests for comment, the White House said that it would not comment on military planning but added, “As the President has indicated, we are pursuing a diplomatic solution”; the Defense Department also said that Iran was being dealt with through “diplomatic channels” but wouldn’t elaborate on that; the C.I.A. said that there were “inaccuracies” in this account but would not specify them.)

“This is much more than a nuclear issue,” one high-ranking diplomat told me in Vienna. “That’s just a rallying point, and there is still time to fix it. But the Administration believes it cannot be fixed unless they control the hearts and minds of Iran. The real issue is who is going to control the Middle East and its oil in the next ten years.”

A senior Pentagon adviser on the war on terror expressed a similar view. “This White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war,” he said. The danger, he said, was that “it also reinforces the belief inside Iran that the only way to defend the country is to have a nuclear capability.” A military conflict that destabilized the region could also increase the risk of terror: “Hezbollah comes into play,” the adviser said, referring to the terror group that is considered one of the world’s most successful, and which is now a Lebanese political party with strong ties to Iran. “And here comes Al Qaeda.”

In recent weeks, the President has quietly initiated a series of talks on plans for Iran with a few key senators and members of Congress, including at least one Democrat. A senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, who did not take part in the meetings but has discussed their content with his colleagues, told me that there had been “no formal briefings,” because “they’re reluctant to brief the minority. They’re doing the Senate, somewhat selectively.”

The House member said that no one in the meetings “is really objecting” to the talk of war. “The people they’re briefing are the same ones who led the charge on Iraq. At most, questions are raised: How are you going to hit all the sites at once? How are you going to get deep enough?” (Iran is building facilities underground.) “There’s no pressure from Congress” not to take military action, the House member added. “The only political pressure is from the guys who want to do it.” Speaking of President Bush, the House member said, “The most worrisome thing is that this guy has a messianic vision.”

Some operations, apparently aimed in part at intimidating Iran, are already under way. American Naval tactical aircraft, operating from carriers in the Arabian Sea, have been flying simulated nuclear-weapons delivery missions—rapid ascending maneuvers known as “over the shoulder” bombing—since last summer, the former official said, within range of Iranian coastal radars.

Last month, in a paper given at a conference on Middle East security in Berlin, Colonel Sam Gardiner, a military analyst who taught at the National War College before retiring from the Air Force, in 1987, provided an estimate of what would be needed to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. Working from satellite photographs of the known facilities, Gardiner estimated that at least four hundred targets would have to be hit. He added:

I don’t think a U.S. military planner would want to stop there. Iran probably has two chemical-production plants. We would hit those. We would want to hit the medium-range ballistic missiles that have just recently been moved closer to Iraq. There are fourteen airfields with sheltered aircraft. . . . We’d want to get rid of that threat. We would want to hit the assets that could be used to threaten Gulf shipping. That means targeting the cruise-missile sites and the Iranian diesel submarines. . . . Some of the facilities may be too difficult to target even with penetrating weapons. The U.S. will have to use Special Operations units.

One of the military’s initial option plans, as presented to the White House by the Pentagon this winter, calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites. One target is Iran’s main centrifuge plant, at Natanz, nearly two hundred miles south of Tehran. Natanz, which is no longer under I.A.E.A. safeguards, reportedly has underground floor space to hold fifty thousand centrifuges, and laboratories and workspaces buried approximately seventy-five feet beneath the surface. That number of centrifuges could provide enough enriched uranium for about twenty nuclear warheads a year. (Iran has acknowledged that it initially kept the existence of its enrichment program hidden from I.A.E.A. inspectors, but claims that none of its current activity is barred by the Non-Proliferation Treaty.) The elimination of Natanz would be a major setback for Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but the conventional weapons in the American arsenal could not insure the destruction of facilities under seventy-five feet of earth and rock, especially if they are reinforced with concrete.

There is a Cold War precedent for targeting deep underground bunkers with nuclear weapons. In the early nineteen-eighties, the American intelligence community watched as the Soviet government began digging a huge underground complex outside Moscow. Analysts concluded that the underground facility was designed for “continuity of government”—for the political and military leadership to survive a nuclear war. (There are similar facilities, in Virginia and Pennsylvania, for the American leadership.) The Soviet facility still exists, and much of what the U.S. knows about it remains classified. “The ‘tell’ ”—the giveaway—“was the ventilator shafts, some of which were disguised,” the former senior intelligence official told me. At the time, he said, it was determined that “only nukes” could destroy the bunker. He added that some American intelligence analysts believe that the Russians helped the Iranians design their underground facility. “We see a similarity of design,” specifically in the ventilator shafts, he said.

A former high-level Defense Department official told me that, in his view, even limited bombing would allow the U.S. to “go in there and do enough damage to slow down the nuclear infrastructure—it’s feasible.” The former defense official said, “The Iranians don’t have friends, and we can tell them that, if necessary, we’ll keep knocking back their infrastructure. The United States should act like we’re ready to go.” He added, “We don’t have to knock down all of their air defenses. Our stealth bombers and standoff missiles really work, and we can blow fixed things up. We can do things on the ground, too, but it’s difficult and very dangerous—put bad stuff in ventilator shafts and put them to sleep.”

But those who are familiar with the Soviet bunker, according to the former senior intelligence official, “say ‘No way.’ You’ve got to know what’s underneath—to know which ventilator feeds people, or diesel generators, or which are false. And there’s a lot that we don’t know.” The lack of reliable intelligence leaves military planners, given the goal of totally destroying the sites, little choice but to consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons. “Every other option, in the view of the nuclear weaponeers, would leave a gap,” the former senior intelligence official said. “ ‘Decisive’ is the key word of the Air Force’s planning. It’s a tough decision. But we made it in Japan.”

He went on, “Nuclear planners go through extensive training and learn the technical details of damage and fallout—we’re talking about mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years. This is not an underground nuclear test, where all you see is the earth raised a little bit. These politicians don’t have a clue, and whenever anybody tries to get it out”—remove the nuclear option—“they’re shouted down.”

The attention given to the nuclear option has created serious misgivings inside the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he added, and some officers have talked about resigning. Late this winter, the Joint Chiefs of Staff sought to remove the nuclear option from the evolving war plans for Iran—without success, the former intelligence official said. “The White House said, ‘Why are you challenging this? The option came from you.’ ”

The Pentagon adviser on the war on terror confirmed that some in the Administration were looking seriously at this option, which he linked to a resurgence of interest in tactical nuclear weapons among Pentagon civilians and in policy circles. He called it “a juggernaut that has to be stopped.” He also confirmed that some senior officers and officials were considering resigning over the issue. “There are very strong sentiments within the military against brandishing nuclear weapons against other countries,” the adviser told me. “This goes to high levels.” The matter may soon reach a decisive point, he said, because the Joint Chiefs had agreed to give President Bush a formal recommendation stating that they are strongly opposed to considering the nuclear option for Iran. “The internal debate on this has hardened in recent weeks,” the adviser said. “And, if senior Pentagon officers express their opposition to the use of offensive nuclear weapons, then it will never happen.”

The adviser added, however, that the idea of using tactical nuclear weapons in such situations has gained support from the Defense Science Board, an advisory panel whose members are selected by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. “They’re telling the Pentagon that we can build the B61 with more blast and less radiation,” he said.

The chairman of the Defense Science Board is William Schneider, Jr., an Under-Secretary of State in the Reagan Administration. In January, 2001, as President Bush prepared to take office, Schneider served on an ad-hoc panel on nuclear forces sponsored by the National Institute for Public Policy, a conservative think tank. The panel’s report recommended treating tactical nuclear weapons as an essential part of the U.S. arsenal and noted their suitability “for those occasions when the certain and prompt destruction of high priority targets is essential and beyond the promise of conventional weapons.” Several signers of the report are now prominent members of the Bush Administration, including Stephen Hadley, the national-security adviser; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; and Robert Joseph, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security.

The Pentagon adviser questioned the value of air strikes. “The Iranians have distributed their nuclear activity very well, and we have no clue where some of the key stuff is. It could even be out of the country,” he said. He warned, as did many others, that bombing Iran could provoke “a chain reaction” of attacks on American facilities and citizens throughout the world: “What will 1.2 billion Muslims think the day we attack Iran?”

With or without the nuclear option, the list of targets may inevitably expand. One recently retired high-level Bush Administration official, who is also an expert on war planning, told me that he would have vigorously argued against an air attack on Iran, because “Iran is a much tougher target” than Iraq. But, he added, “If you’re going to do any bombing to stop the nukes, you might as well improve your lie across the board. Maybe hit some training camps, and clear up a lot of other problems.”

The Pentagon adviser said that, in the event of an attack, the Air Force intended to strike many hundreds of targets in Iran but that “ninety-nine per cent of them have nothing to do with proliferation. There are people who believe it’s the way to operate”—that the Administration can achieve its policy goals in Iran with a bombing campaign, an idea that has been supported by neoconservatives.

If the order were to be given for an attack, the American combat troops now operating in Iran would be in position to mark the critical targets with laser beams, to insure bombing accuracy and to minimize civilian casualties. As of early winter, I was told by the government consultant with close ties to civilians in the Pentagon, the units were also working with minority groups in Iran, including the Azeris, in the north, the Baluchis, in the southeast, and the Kurds, in the northeast. The troops “are studying the terrain, and giving away walking-around money to ethnic tribes, and recruiting scouts from local tribes and shepherds,” the consultant said. One goal is to get “eyes on the ground”—quoting a line from “Othello,” he said, “Give me the ocular proof.” The broader aim, the consultant said, is to “encourage ethnic tensions” and undermine the regime.

The new mission for the combat troops is a product of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s long-standing interest in expanding the role of the military in covert operations, which was made official policy in the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review, published in February. Such activities, if conducted by C.I.A. operatives, would need a Presidential Finding and would have to be reported to key members of Congress.

“ ‘Force protection’ is the new buzzword,” the former senior intelligence official told me. He was referring to the Pentagon’s position that clandestine activities that can be broadly classified as preparing the battlefield or protecting troops are military, not intelligence, operations, and are therefore not subject to congressional oversight. “The guys in the Joint Chiefs of Staff say there are a lot of uncertainties in Iran,” he said. “We need to have more than what we had in Iraq. Now we have the green light to do everything we want.”

The President’s deep distrust of Ahmadinejad has strengthened his determination to confront Iran. This view has been reinforced by allegations that Ahmadinejad, who joined a special-forces brigade of the Revolutionary Guards in 1986, may have been involved in terrorist activities in the late eighties. (There are gaps in Ahmadinejad’s official biography in this period.) Ahmadinejad has reportedly been connected to Imad Mughniyeh, a terrorist who has been implicated in the deadly bombings of the U.S. Embassy and the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, in 1983. Mughniyeh was then the security chief of Hezbollah; he remains on the F.B.I.’s list of most-wanted terrorists.

Robert Baer, who was a C.I.A. officer in the Middle East and elsewhere for two decades, told me that Ahmadinejad and his Revolutionary Guard colleagues in the Iranian government “are capable of making a bomb, hiding it, and launching it at Israel. They’re apocalyptic Shiites. If you’re sitting in Tel Aviv and you believe they’ve got nukes and missiles—you’ve got to take them out. These guys are nuts, and there’s no reason to back off.”

Under Ahmadinejad, the Revolutionary Guards have expanded their power base throughout the Iranian bureaucracy; by the end of January, they had replaced thousands of civil servants with their own members. One former senior United Nations official, who has extensive experience with Iran, depicted the turnover as “a white coup,” with ominous implications for the West. “Professionals in the Foreign Ministry are out; others are waiting to be kicked out,” he said. “We may be too late. These guys now believe that they are stronger than ever since the revolution.” He said that, particularly in consideration of China’s emergence as a superpower, Iran’s attitude was “To hell with the West. You can do as much as you like.”

Iran’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, is considered by many experts to be in a stronger position than Ahmadinejad. “Ahmadinejad is not in control,” one European diplomat told me. “Power is diffuse in Iran. The Revolutionary Guards are among the key backers of the nuclear program, but, ultimately, I don’t think they are in charge of it. The Supreme Leader has the casting vote on the nuclear program, and the Guards will not take action without his approval.”

The Pentagon adviser on the war on terror said that “allowing Iran to have the bomb is not on the table. We cannot have nukes being sent downstream to a terror network. It’s just too dangerous.” He added, “The whole internal debate is on which way to go”—in terms of stopping the Iranian program. It is possible, the adviser said, that Iran will unilaterally renounce its nuclear plans—and forestall the American action. “God may smile on us, but I don’t think so. The bottom line is that Iran cannot become a nuclear-weapons state. The problem is that the Iranians realize that only by becoming a nuclear state can they defend themselves against the U.S. Something bad is going to happen.”

While almost no one disputes Iran’s nuclear ambitions, there is intense debate over how soon it could get the bomb, and what to do about that. Robert Gallucci, a former government expert on nonproliferation who is now the dean of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown, told me, “Based on what I know, Iran could be eight to ten years away” from developing a deliverable nuclear weapon. Gallucci added, “If they had a covert nuclear program and we could prove it, and we could not stop it by negotiation, diplomacy, or the threat of sanctions, I’d be in favor of taking it out. But if you do it”—bomb Iran—“without being able to show there’s a secret program, you’re in trouble.”

Meir Dagan, the head of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, told the Knesset last December that “Iran is one to two years away, at the latest, from having enriched uranium. From that point, the completion of their nuclear weapon is simply a technical matter.” In a conversation with me, a senior Israeli intelligence official talked about what he said was Iran’s duplicity: “There are two parallel nuclear programs” inside Iran—the program declared to the I.A.E.A. and a separate operation, run by the military and the Revolutionary Guards. Israeli officials have repeatedly made this argument, but Israel has not produced public evidence to support it. Richard Armitage, the Deputy Secretary of State in Bush’s first term, told me, “I think Iran has a secret nuclear-weapons program—I believe it, but I don’t know it.”

In recent months, the Pakistani government has given the U.S. new access to A. Q. Khan, the so-called father of the Pakistani atomic bomb. Khan, who is now living under house arrest in Islamabad, is accused of setting up a black market in nuclear materials; he made at least one clandestine visit to Tehran in the late nineteen-eighties. In the most recent interrogations, Khan has provided information on Iran’s weapons design and its time line for building a bomb. “The picture is of ‘unquestionable danger,’ ” the former senior intelligence official said. (The Pentagon adviser also confirmed that Khan has been “singing like a canary.”) The concern, the former senior official said, is that “Khan has credibility problems. He is suggestible, and he’s telling the neoconservatives what they want to hear”—or what might be useful to Pakistan’s President, Pervez Musharraf, who is under pressure to assist Washington in the war on terror.

“I think Khan’s leading us on,” the former intelligence official said. “I don’t know anybody who says, ‘Here’s the smoking gun.’ But lights are beginning to blink. He’s feeding us information on the time line, and targeting information is coming in from our own sources— sensors and the covert teams. The C.I.A., which was so burned by Iraqi W.M.D., is going to the Pentagon and the Vice-President’s office saying, ‘It’s all new stuff.’ People in the Administration are saying, ‘We’ve got enough.’ ”

The Administration’s case against Iran is compromised by its history of promoting false intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. In a recent essay on the Foreign Policy Web site, entitled “Fool Me Twice,” Joseph Cirincione, the director for nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote, “The unfolding administration strategy appears to be an effort to repeat its successful campaign for the Iraq war.” He noted several parallels:

The vice president of the United States gives a major speech focused on the threat from an oil-rich nation in the Middle East. The U.S. Secretary of State tells Congress that the same nation is our most serious global challenge. The Secretary of Defense calls that nation the leading supporter of global terrorism.

Cirincione called some of the Administration’s claims about Iran “questionable” or lacking in evidence. When I spoke to him, he asked, “What do we know? What is the threat? The question is: How urgent is all this?” The answer, he said, “is in the intelligence community and the I.A.E.A.” (In August, the Washington Post reported that the most recent comprehensive National Intelligence Estimate predicted that Iran was a decade away from being a nuclear power.)

Last year, the Bush Administration briefed I.A.E.A. officials on what it said was new and alarming information about Iran’s weapons program which had been retrieved from an Iranian’s laptop. The new data included more than a thousand pages of technical drawings of weapons systems. The Washington Post reported that there were also designs for a small facility that could be used in the uranium-enrichment process. Leaks about the laptop became the focal point of stories in the Times and elsewhere. The stories were generally careful to note that the materials could have been fabricated, but also quoted senior American officials as saying that they appeared to be legitimate. The headline in the Times’ account read, “RELYING ON COMPUTER, U.S. SEEKS TO PROVE IRAN’S NUCLEAR AIMS.”

I was told in interviews with American and European intelligence officials, however, that the laptop was more suspect and less revelatory than it had been depicted. The Iranian who owned the laptop had initially been recruited by German and American intelligence operatives, working together. The Americans eventually lost interest in him. The Germans kept on, but the Iranian was seized by the Iranian counter-intelligence force. It is not known where he is today. Some family members managed to leave Iran with his laptop and handed it over at a U.S. embassy, apparently in Europe. It was a classic “walk-in.”

A European intelligence official said, “There was some hesitation on our side” about what the materials really proved, “and we are still not convinced.” The drawings were not meticulous, as newspaper accounts suggested, “but had the character of sketches,” the European official said. “It was not a slam-dunk smoking gun.”

The threat of American military action has created dismay at the headquarters of the I.A.E.A., in Vienna. The agency’s officials believe that Iran wants to be able to make a nuclear weapon, but “nobody has presented an inch of evidence of a parallel nuclear-weapons program in Iran,” the high-ranking diplomat told me. The I.A.E.A.’s best estimate is that the Iranians are five years away from building a nuclear bomb. “But, if the United States does anything militarily, they will make the development of a bomb a matter of Iranian national pride,” the diplomat said. “The whole issue is America’s risk assessment of Iran’s future intentions, and they don’t trust the regime. Iran is a menace to American policy.”

In Vienna, I was told of an exceedingly testy meeting earlier this year between Mohamed ElBaradei, the I.A.E.A.’s director-general, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, and Robert Joseph, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control. Joseph’s message was blunt, one diplomat recalled: “We cannot have a single centrifuge spinning in Iran. Iran is a direct threat to the national security of the United States and our allies, and we will not tolerate it. We want you to give us an understanding that you will not say anything publicly that will undermine us. ”

Joseph’s heavy-handedness was unnecessary, the diplomat said, since the I.A.E.A. already had been inclined to take a hard stand against Iran. “All of the inspectors are angry at being misled by the Iranians, and some think the Iranian leadership are nutcases—one hundred per cent totally certified nuts,” the diplomat said. He added that ElBaradei’s overriding concern is that the Iranian leaders “want confrontation, just like the neocons on the other side”—in Washington. “At the end of the day, it will work only if the United States agrees to talk to the Iranians.”

The central question—whether Iran will be able to proceed with its plans to enrich uranium—is now before the United Nations, with the Russians and the Chinese reluctant to impose sanctions on Tehran. A discouraged former I.A.E.A. official told me in late March that, at this point, “there’s nothing the Iranians could do that would result in a positive outcome. American diplomacy does not allow for it. Even if they announce a stoppage of enrichment, nobody will believe them. It’s a dead end.”

Another diplomat in Vienna asked me, “Why would the West take the risk of going to war against that kind of target without giving it to the I.A.E.A. to verify? We’re low-cost, and we can create a program that will force Iran to put its cards on the table.” A Western Ambassador in Vienna expressed similar distress at the White House’s dismissal of the I.A.E.A. He said, “If you don’t believe that the I.A.E.A. can establish an inspection system—if you don’t trust them—you can only bomb.”

There is little sympathy for the I.A.E.A. in the Bush Administration or among its European allies. “We’re quite frustrated with the director-general,” the European diplomat told me. “His basic approach has been to describe this as a dispute between two sides with equal weight. It’s not. We’re the good guys! ElBaradei has been pushing the idea of letting Iran have a small nuclear-enrichment program, which is ludicrous. It’s not his job to push ideas that pose a serious proliferation risk.”

The Europeans are rattled, however, by their growing perception that President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney believe a bombing campaign will be needed, and that their real goal is regime change. “Everyone is on the same page about the Iranian bomb, but the United States wants regime change,” a European diplomatic adviser told me. He added, “The Europeans have a role to play as long as they don’t have to choose between going along with the Russians and the Chinese or going along with Washington on something they don’t want. Their policy is to keep the Americans engaged in something the Europeans can live with. It may be untenable.”

“The Brits think this is a very bad idea,” Flynt Leverett, a former National Security Council staff member who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center, told me, “but they’re really worried we’re going to do it.” The European diplomatic adviser acknowledged that the British Foreign Office was aware of war planning in Washington but that, “short of a smoking gun, it’s going to be very difficult to line up the Europeans on Iran.” He said that the British “are jumpy about the Americans going full bore on the Iranians, with no compromise.”

The European diplomat said that he was skeptical that Iran, given its record, had admitted to everything it was doing, but “to the best of our knowledge the Iranian capability is not at the point where they could successfully run centrifuges” to enrich uranium in quantity. One reason for pursuing diplomacy was, he said, Iran’s essential pragmatism. “The regime acts in its best interests,” he said. Iran’s leaders “take a hard-line approach on the nuclear issue and they want to call the American bluff,” believing that “the tougher they are the more likely the West will fold.” But, he said, “From what we’ve seen with Iran, they will appear superconfident until the moment they back off.”

The diplomat went on, “You never reward bad behavior, and this is not the time to offer concessions. We need to find ways to impose sufficient costs to bring the regime to its senses. It’s going to be a close call, but I think if there is unity in opposition and the price imposed”—in sanctions—“is sufficient, they may back down. It’s too early to give up on the U.N. route.” He added, “If the diplomatic process doesn’t work, there is no military ‘solution.’ There may be a military option, but the impact could be catastrophic.”

Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, was George Bush’s most dependable ally in the year leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But he and his party have been racked by a series of financial scandals, and his popularity is at a low point. Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, said last year that military action against Iran was “inconceivable.” Blair has been more circumspect, saying publicly that one should never take options off the table.

Other European officials expressed similar skepticism about the value of an American bombing campaign. “The Iranian economy is in bad shape, and Ahmadinejad is in bad shape politically,” the European intelligence official told me. “He will benefit politically from American bombing. You can do it, but the results will be worse.” An American attack, he said, would alienate ordinary Iranians, including those who might be sympathetic to the U.S. “Iran is no longer living in the Stone Age, and the young people there have access to U.S. movies and books, and they love it,” he said. “If there was a charm offensive with Iran, the mullahs would be in trouble in the long run.”

Another European official told me that he was aware that many in Washington wanted action. “It’s always the same guys,” he said, with a resigned shrug. “There is a belief that diplomacy is doomed to fail. The timetable is short.”

A key ally with an important voice in the debate is Israel, whose leadership has warned for years that it viewed any attempt by Iran to begin enriching uranium as a point of no return. I was told by several officials that the White House’s interest in preventing an Israeli attack on a Muslim country, which would provoke a backlash across the region, was a factor in its decision to begin the current operational planning. In a speech in Cleveland on March 20th, President Bush depicted Ahmadinejad’s hostility toward Israel as a “serious threat. It’s a threat to world peace.” He added, “I made it clear, I’ll make it clear again, that we will use military might to protect our ally Israel.”

Any American bombing attack, Richard Armitage told me, would have to consider the following questions: “What will happen in the other Islamic countries? What ability does Iran have to reach us and touch us globally—that is, terrorism? Will Syria and Lebanon up the pressure on Israel? What does the attack do to our already diminished international standing? And what does this mean for Russia, China, and the U.N. Security Council?”

Iran, which now produces nearly four million barrels of oil a day, would not have to cut off production to disrupt the world’s oil markets. It could blockade or mine the Strait of Hormuz, the thirty-four-mile-wide passage through which Middle Eastern oil reaches the Indian Ocean. Nonetheless, the recently retired defense official dismissed the strategic consequences of such actions. He told me that the U.S. Navy could keep shipping open by conducting salvage missions and putting mine- sweepers to work. “It’s impossible to block passage,” he said. The government consultant with ties to the Pentagon also said he believed that the oil problem could be managed, pointing out that the U.S. has enough in its strategic reserves to keep America running for sixty days. However, those in the oil business I spoke to were less optimistic; one industry expert estimated that the price per barrel would immediately spike, to anywhere from ninety to a hundred dollars per barrel, and could go higher, depending on the duration and scope of the conflict.

Michel Samaha, a veteran Lebanese Christian politician and former cabinet minister in Beirut, told me that the Iranian retaliation might be focussed on exposed oil and gas fields in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. “They would be at risk,” he said, “and this could begin the real jihad of Iran versus the West. You will have a messy world.”

Iran could also initiate a wave of terror attacks in Iraq and elsewhere, with the help of Hezbollah. On April 2nd, the Washington Post reported that the planning to counter such attacks “is consuming a lot of time” at U.S. intelligence agencies. “The best terror network in the world has remained neutral in the terror war for the past several years,” the Pentagon adviser on the war on terror said of Hezbollah. “This will mobilize them and put us up against the group that drove Israel out of southern Lebanon. If we move against Iran, Hezbollah will not sit on the sidelines. Unless the Israelis take them out, they will mobilize against us.” (When I asked the government consultant about that possibility, he said that, if Hezbollah fired rockets into northern Israel, “Israel and the new Lebanese government will finish them off.”)

The adviser went on, “If we go, the southern half of Iraq will light up like a candle.” The American, British, and other coalition forces in Iraq would be at greater risk of attack from Iranian troops or from Shiite militias operating on instructions from Iran. (Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, has close ties to the leading Shiite parties in Iraq.) A retired four-star general told me that, despite the eight thousand British troops in the region, “the Iranians could take Basra with ten mullahs and one sound truck.”

“If you attack,” the high-ranking diplomat told me in Vienna, “Ahmadinejad will be the new Saddam Hussein of the Arab world, but with more credibility and more power. You must bite the bullet and sit down with the Iranians.”

The diplomat went on, “There are people in Washington who would be unhappy if we found a solution. They are still banking on isolation and regime change. This is wishful thinking.” He added, “The window of opportunity is now.” - SEYMOUR M. HERSH Copyright © CondéNet 2006. [See the Fair use Notice, below.] (via Information Clearing House)

posted by George Thomas Kysor 11:54 AM

Friday, April 07, 2006

The Century of the Self , Part One 

1-hour video. Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self tells the untold and sometimes controversial story of the growth of the mass-consumer society in Britain and the United States. How was the all-consuming self created, by whom, and in whose interests?

Freud provided useful tools for understanding the secret desires of the masses. Unwittingly, his work served as the precursor to a world full of political spin doctors, marketing moguls, and society's belief that the pursuit of satisfaction and happiness is man's ultimate goal. - Information Clearing House

posted by George Thomas Kysor 10:32 PM

"Depleted uranium is the weapon that keeps giving and it keeps killing." - Leuren Moret

posted by George Thomas Kysor 1:37 PM

Pedophile? Or TSA Screener? 

After his arrest on Tuesday for attempting to seduce an undercover cop, Deputy Press Secretary Brian Doyle was suspended by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). This is clearly a mistake. The DHS should merely demote him: far from being a criminal, Brian is just another victim of the Peter Principle. He belongs at an airport, wielding a wand and a uniform, rather than in the PR office at DHS headquarters. I predict that with a wee bit of training, Brian will quickly become Screener of the Year at the DHS's most infamous bureaucracy, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

Consider the skills Brian has demonstrated in his enthusiasm for teen-aged girls, and ask yourself whether these talents should wither in prison rather than enhance airport security. For instance, AP tells us that "on several occasions, Doyle instructed [the undercover cop] to perform a sexual act while thinking of him and described explicit activities he wanted to have with her..." Ergo, Brian should excel at ordering passengers to spread their legs so he can stick his wand between them. I see him eagerly studying passengers' stockinged feet, too, à la Dick Morris. Brian may need help with the next step, that of actually molesting folks, because, unlike screeners, he has heretofore contented himself with pecking out words on a keyboard. Confronted with living, quivering flesh, he may be temporarily paralyzed with ecstasy, akin to an alcoholic who finds himself alone with a full bottle. That's where the training comes in. With the right attitude, however, our hero should soon be patting down his victims with the best of them.

Brian also likes dirty pictures. The Tampa Tribune reports that "Doyle repeatedly request[ed the undercover cop]... to purchase a Web camera so that she could send explicit images to Doyle... Doyle promised to reciprocate..." Here again, Brian’s hobby admirably fits him for work as a screener since enthusiasm for "explicit images" is fast becoming a job requirement. For almost a year now, the TSA has been threatening to install "backscatter X-rays machines" at airport checkpoints nationwide. These refrigerator-sized gadgets peer through clothes to the flesh beneath, virtually stripping the passengers forced to walk through them while screeners watch.

All in all, Brian ought to be commended and put on the TSA’s fast track. Instead, he was entrapped by "two full-time computer crime detectives" in the Polk County (FL) sheriff's office with nothing better to do than "pose online as teenagers."

"He chose us. He initiated the conversation," a spokesgal for the cops said. "This is how we catch predators." No word on whether fear’s spreading among the approximately 45,000 screeners still at large and preying on us.

Actually, regardless of the crimes Brian has committed against our freedom and the Constitution, he is innocent of the felonies for which he was arrested. He did nothing but email pornography to another, very willing adult, one who eagerly responded and who played on his emotions by pretending to have survived cancer. True, Brian "believed" the cop to be a 14-year-old girl, but only fascists prosecute a man for his thoughts.

Unfortunately for Brian, fascists now run the country. Russ Knocke, Brian's fellow spokesliar at the DHS, solemnly intoned, "We take these allegations very seriously, and we will cooperate fully with this ongoing investigation."

On the other hand, perhaps a sort of cosmic justice is at work here. The Polk folks who nailed Brian hail from the county next door to Orlando’s. And Orlando was home to Rigoberto Alpizar, whose murder last December Brian helped cover up. When Federal air marshals gunned down this passenger for disembarking from his plane, Brian stepped up to the DHS mike and shamelessly lied: "[Alpizar] threatened that he had a bomb in his backpack." This completely contradicted testimony from eyewitnesses aboard the flight, some of whom vigorously denied that Mr. Alpizar said anything whatever and all of whom agreed he never uttered the word "bomb." Yet the marshals were never charged in Mr. Alpizar’s death, and the lie has been told so often it is now "true": a story in USA Today earlier this week mentioned "the case last December in which a man who falsely said he had a bomb was shot and killed by a federal air marshal in Miami."

In his arrest as a pedophile, Brian may not reap exactly what he sowed. But it’s close enough for government work. - Becky Akers Copyright © 2006 LewRockwell.com [See the Fair Use Notice, below.]

posted by George Thomas Kysor 12:10 PM

Fibs - Fibonacci-based Poetry 

April is National Poetry Month (and, it turns out, Math Awareness Month), and on my blog, I decided to get people writing poetry based on the Fibonacci sequence. The poems are six lines, 20 syllables long with the syllable pattern 1/1/2/3/5/8, though they can go longer, obviously. I've been calling 'em Fibs, and people have been writing them on pop culture, politics, math, and more. - Gregory K.

Ants
Can’t
Wear pants
When they dance.
Plus I’ve heard the news
They never put on dancing shoes. - Gregory K.

Stop!
Thief!
Police!
Stop that man!
He's getting away -
that's my music on his iPod! - filament

(via Slashdot)

posted by George Thomas Kysor 11:25 AM

EFF Files Evidence in Motion to Stop AT&T's Dragnet Surveillance 

Internal AT&T Documents Had Been Temporarily Held Back Due To Government's Concerns

San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on Wednesday filed the legal briefs and evidence supporting its motion for a preliminary injunction in its class-action lawsuit against AT&T. After asking EFF to hold back the documents so that it could review them, the Department of Justice consented to EFF's filing them under seal -- a well-established procedure that prohibits public access and permits only the judge and the litigants to see the evidence. While not a party to the case, the government was concerned that even this procedure would not provide sufficient security and has represented to the Court that it is "presently considering whether and, if so, how it will participate in this case."

"The evidence that we are filing supports our claim that AT&T is diverting Internet traffic into the hands of the NSA wholesale, in violation of federal wiretapping laws and the Fourth Amendment," said EFF Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. "More than just threatening individuals' privacy, AT&T's apparent choice to give the government secret, direct access to millions of ordinary Americans' Internet communications is a threat to the Constitution itself. We are asking the Court to put a stop to it now."

EFF's evidence regarding AT&T's dragnet surveillance of its networks includes a declaration by Mark Klein, a retired AT&T telecommunications technician, and several internal AT&T documents. This evidence was bolstered and explained by the expert opinion of J. Scott Marcus, who served as Senior Technical Advisor for Internet Technology to the Federal Communications Commission from July 2001 until July 2005.

The internal AT&T documents and portions of the supporting declarations have been submitted to the Court under a tentative seal, a procedure that allows AT&T five court days to explain to the Court why the information should be kept from the public.

"The public deserves to know about AT&T's illegal program," said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. "In an abundance of caution, we are providing AT&T with an opportunity to explain itself before this material goes on the public docket, but we believe that justice will ultimately require full disclosure."

The NSA program came to light in December, when the New York Times reported that the President had authorized the agency to intercept telephone and Internet communications inside the United States without the authorization of any court. Over the ensuing weeks, it became clear that the NSA program has been intercepting and analyzing millions of Americans' communications, with the help of the country's largest phone and Internet companies, including AT&T.

"Mark Klein is a true American hero," said EFF Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl. "He has bravely come forward with information critical for proving AT&T's involvement with the government's invasive surveillance program."

In the lawsuit, EFF is representing the class of all AT&T residential customers nationwide. Working with EFF in the lawsuit are the law firms Traber & Voorhees, Lerach Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins LLP and the Law Office of Richard R. Wiebe.

For the notice of motion for preliminary injunction:
http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/att/NotMot.pdf

For the motion to lodge under temporary seal:
http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/att/MotionReSealing.pdf

For more on EFF's suit:
http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/att/

Contacts:

Derek Slater
Acting Media Coordinator
Electronic Frontier Foundation
derek@eff.org

For Mark Klein:
Miles Ehrlich, Esq.
Ramsey & Ehrlich
miles@ramsey-ehrlich.com

- Electronic Frontier Foundation (via Slashdot)

posted by George Thomas Kysor 8:58 AM

Opinion of DOJ on the FISA statute vs a NSA operation 

posted by George Thomas Kysor 8:30 AM

Video Report on UK Mercenaries shooting Iraqi Civilians 

"We don't know whether it was an innocent civilian or whether that was an insurgent - we don't know, because we never stop". The words of a former security consultant, explaining the story behind the video footage. - UK Channel 4 video report (via Information Clearing House)

posted by George Thomas Kysor 12:53 AM

Thursday, April 06, 2006

C-Span Interview with Karen Kwiatkowski 

She discusses her opinion of the build up to war in Iraq from her position in the Near East/ South Asia policy office at the Pentagon. Also, we discuss her service in the Air Force, why she choose to leave the military and the current state of the military-industrial complex. - Q & A, a C-Span series. To receive automatic announcements of her new articles, send an email to karen_kwiatkowski-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

posted by George Thomas Kysor 9:04 PM

New Phishing Flaw in Internet Explorer 

Hai Nam Luke has discovered a vulnerability in Internet Explorer, which can be exploited by malicious people to conduct phishing attacks.

Please use the test here, to see an example of how this vulnerability can be exploited, and also to determine whether or not your browser is vulnerable. (via Slashdot)

posted by George Thomas Kysor 2:17 PM

SEPTEMBER 11: Evidence to the Contrary REDUX 2006 

Another 911 video 1 Hr 26 Min (via Republic Broadcasting Network)

posted by George Thomas Kysor 1:04 PM

Get Behind Leo Wanta Who Is Holding 27.5 Trillion In Trust For You! 

If Americans ever want to reclaim their Republic, understanding the importance of the story behind jailed Ambassador Leo Wanta is a good starting point. In fact, the Wanta case may prove to be the "story of the century" even though it is cloaked in a complicated web of financial accounting, mystery and intrigue dating back to the end of the Cold War.

For starters, as unbelievable as it sounds, Wanta is the legal trustee according to a 2003 federal court ruling of more than 27.5 trillion dollars in repatriation assets held in overseas accounts and under protection for the American people.

The vast sum of money, now held in trust, are the fruits of exorbitant profits from Wanta's financial scheme to destabilize Soviet currency at the end of the Cold War after being assigned the task as a U.S. Treasury agent under President Ronald Reagan. (See Arctic Beacon story at http://www.arcticbeacon.com/26-Mar-2006.html.)

Of course, if the money is released, Wanta is due a hefty sum for his own personal use, a fact which scares his Illuminati enemies, including the Bush and Clinton crime families since he will immediately become one of the richest men in the world able to wield enormous power.

But in a conversation this week from his Switzerland home, where he is still being held under house arrest for what he calls "bogus" Wisconsin state tax evasion charges, he promised to use all repatriation monies released to him for the "good of the American people" not his own personal gain.

"What needs to be done is to create a commission representing the people, using the facts in my case to expose politicians, forcing them to use the money for the public good not for their own benefit," said Wanta in an extended conversation from his Swiss home, suggesting his case could be used as financial leverage to once and for all change the corrupt Federal Reserve banking system.

According to binding contractual terms in the 2003 federal court case, under contracts with Wanta's proprietary company, Ameri-tech, about half the money would immediately go into the U.S. Treasury, immediately wiping out the national debt, and the other half would be retained by Wanta and Ameri-trust.

"If the money ever gets released with full protection for the American people, I am prepared to use the remaining sum in my private control only for the good of the people for things like roads, education and health care," said Wanta, leaving open the obvious question of who would the American people prefer to trust: proven liars and criminals like Bush and Clinton or Wanta, who appears to be playing ball with the people not the Illuminati New World Order banksters.

So the major question looms: Why is 27.5 trillion dollars still in financial limbo?

According to Wanta and other financial analysts, as the laws are written today, if the money was returned, it would immediately be stolen, being placed into Illuminati bankster accounts under the crooked private Federal Reserve laws illegally manipulating the financial future of America.

In essence, the 2003 federal court ruling protected this from happening and became a big stumbling block to people like Bush and Clinton who wanted the money kept under the public radar screen and secretly distributed into private accounts.

"The time has run out for a government appeal. But they never wanted that in the first place because it was something they didn't want the public to ever find out about," added Wanta.

And to show the secrecy and corruption going on behind the scenes, Wanta was illegally put in a Swiss dungeon for 134 days in the early 1990's to essentially get him out of the way.

Upon his release, he was then extradited and found guilty of "trumped up" and nickel and dime" state income tax evasion charges, spending another long jail term before recently being released on house arrest with 10 years remaining on his 22 year sentence.

To add insult to injury while Wanta was jailed, until the federal court 2003 ruling, Bush, Clinton and their Illuminati minions found a devious way to use Wanta's Ameri-trust funds as their "own personal cash cow."

To prove his point, Wanta has meticulously documented how "Bush, Clinton and his criminal gang of thieves" have stolen more than 700 billion dollars from Ameri-trust accounts while in jail. (See Arctic Beacon story at http://www.arcticbeacon.com/26-Mar-2006.html for Wanta's accounting of the stolen money.)

And while Bush and Clinton were busy getting their dirty hands even dirtier, Wanta points out they even refused to use $5 billion for a plan which he proposed through corporately funded activities for U.S. Hurricane Evacuation and Recovery Operations from Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas.

Wanta said the 1999 plan, under a company he formed called Marvelous Investments Unlimited, consisted of four expandable traffic lanes with double track railroad lines, underground freshwater pipeline, electrical systems, gas/oil pipeline, fiber-optic communication trunk line, lodgings, medical facilities, and much more as outlined in the overall MIL/design planning.

Wanta added the plan would have commenced in 1999 with full private sector funding solely by "Marvelous Investments Limited" through their lawful ownership and management of Parkhead Financial, Inc. with lawful repatriation corporate MIL/AmeriTrust/New Republic from repatriation assets still being held in trust for the American people.

However, the plan, which would have also employed 12-14,000 people, was derailed by Washington power brokers, clearly showing the crooked policy brokers, by axing the Wanta proposal, never intended to prepare the Gulf Coast for eventual disasters like Hurricane Katrina, instead leaving the area vulnerable for heavy disaster and death tolls even when money was clearly available.

"Just a sad thought that just maybe American lives taken by Hurricane Katrina would have been lessened and our National Economy may have been strengthened by these corporately funded activities," said Wanta, adding there was plenty of money available to have repaired the defective New Orleans levy system prior to Katrina if politicians has their priorities straight in the first place.

"I remain with deep sadness, but hopeful for the survival and reconstruction of New Orleans, and maybe now the original 'Hurricane Routes' can be implemented before I die with heavy heart and old age, something that should have been done by others that remain unknown and not caring for our American Rule of Law, inter alia. May Our Lord bless our departing soul and Our Great Nation." - Greg Szymanski (via What Really Happened)
1st hour
2nd hour

posted by George Thomas Kysor 12:24 AM

Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Short video 

Jon Stewart grills John McCain about McCain's recent efforts to cozy up to Jerry Falwell. - CrooksAndLiars (via What Really Happened)

posted by George Thomas Kysor 7:37 PM

WHY AMERICANS REFUSE TO BELIEVE THE 9/11 EVIDENCE!!! 

The attacks of 9/11 were so unthinkable that most Americans would refuse to believe the complicity of their own government, even if presented with a mountain of evidence.

Very simply, it is possible to escape blame if you do something that nobody in the world believes you could do.

PROLOGUE

When I was 11 years old I sat next to my friend and fellow class clown Jeffery, quietly thinking of ways to torture the unsuspecting substitute teacher. Jeffery and I were competing comedians, always trying to "get over" on each other in school. Jeffery was good and there were no limits to what he would do.

On this particular day we sat next to each other, sharing one of the double desks with which Brooklyn school children of the 70’s were so familiar. As our unsuspecting substitute turned his back to write something on the black board, Jeffery raised his arm and launched all his own books across the room in the direction opposite from where I was seated, immediately turning towards me with a look of horror and shock plastered on his face. The teacher, alarmed by the noise of the book launching, spun around only to see Jeffery's books scattered around the room. His loose leaf binder had opened up and produced an explosion of confetti in the form of notes and homework sheets.

A quick glance our way by the teacher brought into view a shocked Jeffery, who appeared to be the victim, sitting right next to me and staring at me with an expression of, "What the hell did you just do?" splashed on his face. I sat there, speechless, as the person on the right side of Jeffery's books prior to their launch to the left. I had nothing to say because the truth was simply not believable and no convincing lie presented itself.

Anyone witnessing this scene from the teacher’s vantage point could only come to one conclusion, Jesse did it. Even if I tried to explain that Jeffery launched the books, who would believe me? After all, who would have done this to his own property? Jeffery would have to spend the next hour or so reassembling his loose leaf binder. There is no way he would have done this to himself. No way, except for one thing...he did do this to himself, his motive...comedy. I was the patsy for two good reasons. First, I was sitting right there when it happened’ and second - I had a history of being a clown. I understood why people thought I was guilty and let me be the first to commend Jeffery for executing the perfect crime. He did the unthinkable and set up a patsy with his convincing claim of innocence.

In this sad, but true story, I was kicked out of the class by our substitute teacher. I was only 11 years old but I knew enough to understand that there was no way in hell that anyone would believe me if I told the truth and said that Jeffery was guilty of tossing his books . And so, having no proof that I was blameless, I swallowed my defeat and walked out of the room wondering what form my revenge against Jeffery would take.

The point to be made is this: sometimes, the more outrageous an action, the easier it is to get away with. Sometimes, there is no way that people can connect the criminal with the crime: the very idea of guilt is so far out of the norm as to be unthinkable.

Very simply, it is possible to escape blame if you do something that nobody in the world believes you could do. If the deed is egregious enough, even if some proof of your culpability surfaces, you’ll be on safe ground. If people cannot imagine your involvement in an unthinkable action, they will simply not believe you could possible be complicit in its commission. Think about it.

THE ART OF DENIAL

Flashback to a heinous crime of the recent past: When Susan Smith appeared before the public to beg the kidnapper of her children to return them to her, the nation cried with her. Her description of the guilty assailant was so very believable. It fit right into the criminal stereotype that had been etched into the psyche of Americans by the corporate media. And for a few very long days, everyone believed her.

But there was one huge problem with her story. It was Susan Smith, herself, who killed her children. Yes, the unbelievable was true. A young mother had actually allowed her own children to drown. It was inconceivable. It just couldn’t be. But it was.

Susan Smith had tried to throw the blame for her crime to a reasonable patsy. Had her story gone unchallenged, she might have gotten away with it. As it was, her crime fell apart because there was an effective investigation. Smith had no way of curtailing or controlling the inquiry into her crime. And as a result, justice was done, and Susan Smith was eventually charged and convicted of murder.

Truth and reality often can be totally unbelievable. It is very possible for people to totally deny assertions presented to them, even when provided with very credible of evidence that corroborates what they are told. A perfect example of such denial occurred when eye witness accounts of the Holocaust began coming out of war torn Europe. The unimaginable horror of what was being reported was simply too terrible to believe. It was easier to deal with the information as some sort of exaggeration and overreaction. Humans simply could not do this to other humans.

Think about what we know about acts of genocide in the Congo or Rwanda or Darfur? The art of denial is a well honed form of human self protection. Sometimes it is far easier to close one’s eyes to the truth than to acknowledge what is very painful. Think about that as well.

9/11 AND AMERICAN DENIAL

In this post 9/11 era, most Americans are unable even to consider the possibility of US government complicity in the attacks on our nation even when confronted with a mountain of evidence. In contrast, many of these same people accept far less believable scenarios simply on the basis of faith and without a single shred of evidence such as believing in the existence of a God. Tragically, they seem to have the exact same blind trust in the Bush administration.

At close inspection, the official version of 9/11 is outrageously full of holes. When those of us who are knowledgeable discuss the evidence that has unearthed about that day, there is so much to reveal that we don’t know where to start or where to stop. When tapped for what we know, we have so much to expose that the torrent of information that rushes can sound like the meaningless rant of a lunatic. Regardless of how credible or tangible the evidence, when rolled out in front of the public, it often sounds too far fetched or irrational to believe.

The facts that have come out about 9/11 differ so greatly from the official story that they almost defy validity. On the contrary, the official version is so simple as to be perfectly believable. It places the entire blame on the work of a handful of terrorists who hated us for our freedom. Case closed.

It is important to keep in mind that the 9/11 issue is not simply a question of whose version of a story is correct. This is a case in which millions of people would be taking a great risk. They would have to consider that the very government they have trusted and supported for more than four years may have participated in an unthinkable atrocity. That, in itself, may be impossible. By opening their minds to an objective examination of what has been discovered about the 9/11 attacks, millions of Americans would have to abandon their blind faith in this administration, and reject the mistaken belief that those in charge of our nation can do no wrong. That, too, may be impossible.

Herein lies the paradox. If the American people want truth they must acknowledge that they have been deceived. If that were to happen, and if they were to accept the facts that have been uncovered by the independent 9/11 research community, their faith in their government would be irreparably destroyed. In the long run, it is far easier to maintain one’s faith in a deceptive government than to deal with the painful details of that deception.

The consequence of such denial is that people end up believing what they must, rather than what is true. As time passes, they totally erase the distinction between fact and fiction in order to believe in their government, and they find themselves living in the America of 2005.

They greater tragedy of course, is the nature of the deception that has been accepted. There are lies, and there are lies. There are deceptions, and there are horrendous deceptions that alter history. .It is one thing for Jeffery to have gone unpunished for throwing his own books around so he could claim the crown of class clown. Thirty years after the fact, our mutual friends now believe the truth, and we can laugh at what went on.

It would have been another thing altogether to have allowed Jeffery to perpetrate a Columbine-like massacre to claim that same crown. There is no way that could have resulted in denial, and there is no way that any one would have dared to laugh.

BOTTOM LINE

Ironically, it’s almost funny when the fact-based 9/11 research community gathers to discuss the events of that day. The official government version of what happened loses so much credibility in the light of the available facts, films, testimony & chronicled history that it is almost impossible not to laugh in disbelief when we start to share what we know. The evidence that has been amassed is so persuasive as to rip the official version of 9/11 to shreds. And still, there is no one but ourselves to hear us.

We go on and on and on like people obsessed because as responsible citizens of the world we have assigned ourselves the task of exposing the truth. But we also have to accept the obstacles we face. We must understand how and why people refuse to believe what we say despite all the evidence in our possession. To explain that phenomenon I think about my friend Jeffery and his book launch. He did something no one believed he could possibly have done. As a result, he carried it off.

The people who were responsible for the attacks of 9/11 did something so unbelievable that most people would not believe they did it, even if presented with conclusive evidence of their guilt. As a result, they also carried it off, and the evidence be damned.

In the end, there is always the comment by those who would discredit the research and the evidence that has been uncovered. The defenders of the official version of 9/11 inevitably ask how so many people could keep a secret. "Wouldn't someone have blown the whistle by now?" is the constant challenge by the champions of denial. How naïve they are.

At the higher levels of government the issue is no longer about secrecy, but about survival. The extent of the 9/11 crimes are so great that a very real scenario of self preservation has arisen. It may well be that whistle blowers fear the consequences of exposing the truth about 9/11, not to themselves, but to the nation.

It is highly probable that they believe that their testimony would lead to the end of the United States of America as a viable power.

In this worst case scenario, the good people in our government and in our intelligence community may really fear that America would never ever regain its credibility in the world, and would never again be respected or trusted. They may envision a terrible time when the United States would relinquish its leadership position in the world and sink to the position of a rogue nation that had committed an unforgivable atrocity against its own people for political purposes. If this is so, can anyone blame them for not coming forward to expose what they know?

A deep love of country might easily create a dilemma for those who know the truth. What would happen at that unimaginable moment when a ranking government official was charged with complicity in 9/11? Would the nation recover? Could the nation heal after such a huge betrayal of the trust that has been cultivated and nurtured over our 230 year history as a nation?

The people who were involved in 9/11 know that there is more at stake than their exposure. They already have the blind loyalty of those Americans who would refuse to believe they could possibly have been involved. . But deep in their corrupted souls they also have another ace in the hole. They are counting on the protection of those who fear for the stability of the nation. They are convinced of their own invincibility and really believe that they will never be held accountable. But they also believe that no one of credibility will step forward to expose them.

As I did with Jeffery, let me be the first to admit that these folks seem to have committed the perfect crime. Not in the sense that they will never be discovered, but in the sense that they believe it will do more harm to the country to expose them than to play along with their charade.

But, in fact, they are badly mistaken. The United States of America will not crumble with the revelation of their actions because our foundation is too strong to falter at their hands. History is never without obstacles to progress and this ordeal will not be an exception. On the contrary, if and when the truth is ever known, this nation will be stronger and nobler for that knowledge.

And it is for those reasons that we must continue to pursue the truth.

Bottom line: the real facts are out there, somewhere. The questions being asked are legitimate and raise reasonable suspicions that must be addressed. And yet, so few Americans are willing to even examine the evidence before them. Truly, there are none so blind as those who will not see. Think about that, and if this farce continues, weep for us all. - TvNewsLIES.org (via shadowmom)

posted by George Thomas Kysor 5:01 PM

Tuesday, April 04, 2006

CHATTER: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping [excerpt] 

"The United States will occasionally have the United
Kingdom keep an eye on individuals in this country,
with the understanding that if Britain turns up any
interesting tidbits, it will slide them across the
table."

INTRODUCTION [excerpt]

Here is a conspiracy theory for you. The United States is the
dominant member of a secret network, along with four other
Anglophone powers--the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia,
and New Zealand--that intercepts the chatter of people around
the planet. The pact between these countries was initiated a
half century ago, in a document so secret that its existence
has never been acknowledged by any of the governments
involved: the UKUSA agreement. The network these countries
have developed collects billions of telephone calls, e-mails,
faxes, and telexes every day and distributes them, through a
series of automated channels, to interested parties in the
five countries. In this manner, the United States spies on
its NATO allies, and the United Kingdom spies on its EU
allies: the network supersedes any other ties of loyalty or
affiliation. Each country has laws against spying on its own
civilians but not against having its "allies" spy on its
civilians--and in this manner the United States will
occasionally have the United Kingdom keep an eye on
individuals in this country, with the understanding that if
Britain turns up any interesting tidbits, it will slide them
across the table.

"Signals intelligence," or Sigint, in the shorthand of
politicos and spies, is the little-known name for listening
in that is used today by the eavesdroppers themselves.
Eavesdropping has become anextraordinarily cutting-edge
game, with listening stations inhaling conversations bounced
via satellites and microwave towers; spy satellites miles
above in space tuning in on radio frequencies on the ground;
and silent and invisible Internet bugs clinging, parasite-
like, to the nodes and junctures of the information
superhighway.

The National Security Agency, the American institution in
charge of electronic eavesdropping, is larger than the CIA
and the FBI combined. In fact, these better-known
intelligence agencies are puny by comparison. Whereas the
CIA has roughly twenty thousand employees and a budget of
approximately $3 billion, the NSA has some sixty thousand
employees scattered around the planet, and its budget is
estimated to be as high as $6 billion per year. The United
States and the United Kingdom are so intimate when it
comes to cooperating on Sigint that the NSA has a much
closer relationship with the British eavesdropping agency-
-Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ)--than it
does with America's own CIA. The Anglophone network is
said to hear absolutely everything, yet its existence
remains a secret--unknown in some cases even to the
legislative bodies of thecountries that run it. The
network is code-named Echelon.

This book is the story of my efforts to figure out how
chatter works: who can listen in and how they go about
it. It is the story of an epic struggle between two
abstract concepts--security and privacy--that is
playing out amid lightning-fast technological and
social change. It's also a story about government
secrecy. My endeavors to chart the secret world of
signals intelligence were frustrated by something I have
come to think of as the Sigint Postulate: there is an
inverse proportion between how much a person is willing
to talk about signals intelligence and how much he or
she actually knows. The fringes of the Sigint world are
peopled by conspiracy theorists and privacy advocates,
paranoids and cranks--colorful characters of dubious
credibility. And the heart of that world, the highly
classified sanctum of America's intelligence establish-
ment, is home to the lowest-profile and most secretive
professional tribe on earth: the eavesdroppers themselves.

The United States has fewer than five thousand spies
operating throughout the world today, but it has some
thirty thousand eavesdroppers. Every three hours, the
NSA's satellites pick up enough information to fill the
Library of Congress. And yet most Americans possess next
to no information about our global eavesdropping apparatus.
As a result, we lack the vocabulary to discuss whether
our intelligence agencies are keeping us safe, or invading
our privacy, or both. We tend to digest concepts such as
"privacy" and "national security" whole, to take them as
undifferentiated and unexamined absolutes, and to refuse-
-because we have too little information or because it is
just too difficult--to plot the various changes taking
place in our society on the liberty-security matrix. We
have no sense of how reliable an index of safety chatter
really is or whether our eavesdropping operations are
worth the billions of dollars we allot to them. We don't
know whether Echelon exists and, if it does exist, how
the shadowy network operates. It all remains an enigma.

I am not an investigative journalist, by training or
inclination. When I set out to see what I could discover
about global eavesdropping, it was as an average curious
civilian. What I found as I started looking into the
means through which the United States and its allies
intercept communications is that this system serves as a
window into, and a metaphor for, a broader series of
issues and dilemmas that will be the defining struggles
of our era: the negotiation between privacy and national
security in a wired world; the profusion of paranoia and
conspiracy theories in an Internet age, in which rumor
abounds but hard information is in short supply; and the
real dangers of unchecked government secrecy. I had
little idea when I started that this quest for
information would take me from a massive "listening
base" in England's Yorkshire moors to the bosom of
bureaucratic Europe in Brussels, from the back rooms of
Washington to the cafes of Copenhagen, to an abandoned
NSA base, hidden in the Smoky Mountains of North
Carolina. Nor did I realize that I would encounter such
a bizarre and memorable cast of characters:
eavesdroppers, who spend their days listening in on
headphones to the private conversations of people
around the planet; protesters, hackers, and activists,
who believe that privacy as we once knew it has ceased
to exist; officials who contend that eventalking about
America's eavesdropping capability is tantamount to
assisting terrorists; and a small band of intrepid
researchers and reporters who have struggled, over the
last three decades, to uncover the world of global
eavesdropping one detail at a time.

CHAPTER ONE [excerpt]

RADOMES IN THE DESERT, RADOMES ON THE MOOR
The Invisible Architecture of Echelon

You cannot help but note the juxtaposition. Here, away
from the world, amid rolling pastures, on a tract of
land where the air is redolent of cow dung, lies the
most sophisticated eavesdropping station on the planet.
England's North Yorkshire moors are, afterall, cow
country. Leaving the elegant Victorian spa town of
Harrogate, my taxi winds west through eight miles of
verdant countryside. Just outside the city, the
traffic thins, and what cars we pass seem to go much
slower than they need to--a deliberate, agrarian pace.
Fields are set off by a network of hedges beneath a
panoramic, cloudless sky. Sheep congregate here and
there, and dozens of cows lounge by crumbling stone
walls, some gazing as we whiz by, others chewing
their cuds, oblivious.

I have been warned, seen photos--I know what to
expect. But as the first dome hovers into sight, I
catch my breath. The bucolic road winds and rises
and falls, and as we dip and rise again and crest a
hill the tip of a great white sphere, shimmering in
the summer heat, becomes visible in the distance.
One giant dimpled dome, a great Kevlar golf ball.
Then suddenly four domes, and then eight, as others
float into view above the hill. A dip in the road
and they're obscured again and then again in sight.

As the taxi rounds the perimeter fence, the base
becomes visible in flashes through a row of trees.
The white globes are called radomes, and each
houses a satellite dish antenna, protecting it
from the elements and masking its orientation-
-the dome itself is just a kind of skin. I count
twenty-eight of these domes in all, ghostly white
against the green of the countryside. They look
otherworldly.

And in a sense, they are. The dishes are hidden
inside the radomes because their supersensitive
antennae are trained on a corresponding set of
satellites hovering more than twenty thousand
miles above. Some of those are communications
satellites that transmit securemessages to
other intelligence installations around the world.
Some are spy satellites, which take photographs,
intercept communications, and use Global
Positioning Systems to pinpoint the locations of
various individuals or vehicles around the planet.
And some of the satellites are regular commercial
communications satellites, the kind that transmit
your telephone calls and Internet traffic across
the oceans. The first two varieties of satellite
were built specifically to correspond with the
base. This third kind, however, was not. These
satellites are managed by a company called
Intelsat, and the signals they relay are private,
civilian communications. But the base collects
these signals, too, soundlessly and ceaselessly
intercepting great flows of private
communications every minute of every hour. The
sign at the gate reads: RAF Menwith Hill. - by
Patrick Radden Keefe Published by Random House,
ISBN: 1400060346 Copyright © 2005 by Patrick S.
Radden Keefe [See the Fair Use Notice, below.]
(via email from the NonFiction Book Club)

posted by George Thomas Kysor 10:22 PM

Free online book 

The book, Are We Spiritual Machines?, presents a discussion between Ray Kurzweil and some of his critics about his theory of artificial intelligence. (via Dmitry Chernikov)

posted by George Thomas Kysor 3:29 PM

Capitol Hill Blue Served National Security Letter 

Doug Thompson of Capitol Hill Blue writes in his "The Rant" section that the Bush Administration, in their persuit of prosecuting reporters for receiving information from whistleblowers, has recently issued hundreds of National Security Letters.

Just how widespread, and uncontrolled, this latest government assault has become hit close to home last week when one of the FBI's National Security Letters arrived at the company that hosts the servers for this web site, Capitol Hill Blue.

The letter demanded traffic data, payment records and other information about the web site along with information on me, the publisher.

Now that's a problem. I own the company that hosts Capitol Hill Blue. So, in effect, the feds want me to turn over information on myself and not tell myself that I'm doing it. You'd think they'd know better.

Here's a link to the rest of the story. - hella troi - Update (via What Really Happened)

posted by George Thomas Kysor 12:43 AM

Monday, April 03, 2006

A 4-minute video 

posted by George Thomas Kysor 6:18 PM

'The Taliban Are Terrorists' 

As Canadian casualties mount in Afghanistan, it’s important to correct three major falsehoods being promoted by the ill-informed, flag-waving media.

1. “Taliban are terrorists.” In 1989, at the end of Soviet occupation, Afghanistan fell into anarchy, civil war, and crime. Rape was endemic. A village prayer leader, Mullah Omar, armed a group of religious students (talibs). He set about fighting banditry, rape and drug dealing, imposing order based on traditional tribal and religious law.

Taliban were not 9/11-style terrorists, but a religious, anti-Communist movement drawn from the Pushtun tribe.

Most of the Taliban’s energies went to fighting Afghan Communists. Iran, India and Russia openly backed the Communists – rechristened, Northern Alliance.

Most of the so-called “terrorist camps” in Afghanistan were in fact bases used by Muslim volunteers who had come to fight Communists there and in Central Asia.

The Taliban shut down production of opium and heroin. But its backwards leaders proved themselves to be harsh and incompetent. Female education was temporarily banned because Communists had infiltrated the nation in the 1970’s through the school system. The Taliban oppressed minority Hazaras, and blew up Buddhist idols.

But Washington gave millions in aid to the Taliban until four months before 9/11. The U.S. once considered using them and Osama bin Laden’s 300 al-Qaida followers to stir revolt in China’s western Muslim regions, and in Russian-dominated Central Asia. The U.S. cut off aid after the Taliban refused to give a key strategic pipeline deal to a U.S. oil firm.

The Taliban’s leaders knew nothing of 9/11, a plot actually hatched in Germany. When the U.S. demanded bin Laden be handed over, the Taliban refused: He was a guest and national hero, wounded six times in the anti-Soviet struggle. The Taliban offered to send bin Laden to an international tribunal once the U.S. presented evidence of his involvement. Washington refused and invaded, blaming the Taliban for 9/11.

Unable to withstand U.S. power, Mullah Omar ordered his men to blend back into the Pushtun population and wage low-grade guerrilla war against the invaders. Other movements, like Hizbi-Islami, joined in battling foreign occupation. Canada unwisely chose to pick a fight with fierce tribesmen whose only desire is to end foreign occupation and be left alone.

2. “Canada is defending ‘democracy’ in Afghanistan.” This is pure propaganda. The U.S. installed the puppet Karzai regime in Kabul, then held an election even more rigged than the ones run by the Soviets. The U.S. spends hundreds of millions to bribe Afghan warlords, most of whom are up to their turbans in drug dealing. Since the Taliban’s overthrow, opium production is up 90%. The U.S.-NATO ruled narco-state Afghanistan now produces most of the world’s heroin. Karazi’s regime would collapse the moment foreign troops leave.

Besides drug lords, the U.S., Canada and NATO are also in league with resurgent Communists – who, with the Soviets, killed 1.5 million Afghans and tortured tens of thousands. The Uzbeks – now U.S. and Canadian allies – are more vicious and brutal than Taliban, and deeply involved in drug trading.

3. “Canada is defending women’s rights.” Laughable nonsense. The Taliban, demonized by western propaganda, mistreated its females no worse than other Afghans. Women are mistreated across South Asia. In India, brides are burned and people hanged for marrying below their caste. An estimated 10 million female fetuses were aborted in India since 1985, according to the leading medical journal Lancet.

Canadian troops are not social workers and won’t change local customs. Only naïve fools think they could. American and Canadian journalists who rushed to Afghanistan see none of this because they stay safely “embedded” with occupation forces. They get the usual cook’s tour and cheery assessments, and are fed PR handouts. Cheerleading for war and flag-waving may sell papers, but it is not responsible journalism. - Eric Margolis Copyright © 2006 Eric Margolis [See the Fair Use Notice, below.]

posted by George Thomas Kysor 2:49 PM

Is It or Isn’t It? [excerpt] 

Is it murder to travel thousands of miles away from your home and drop a bomb, scatter cluster bomblets, throw a grenade, launch a missile, or fire a gun at someone in his home that you have never met who was no threat to you until the United States invaded his country? If it is not murder then what are you going to call it? Justifiable homicide? Manslaughter? Self-defense? Perhaps it can be masked as collateral damage, peacekeeping, or spreading democracy?

Any sane man would say that if you travel thousands of miles from your home in Florida to California and blow up a building so as to kill the people inside then you are a murderer. What is it that separates murder from mere killing? What makes the difference? Does killing someone in a foreign country instead of on U.S. soil make the difference? Does the religion of the people you kill make the difference? Does wearing a uniform make the difference? Does getting a paycheck from the government make the difference? Does using a government-issued weapon make the difference? Does following a government order make the difference? - Laurence M. Vance Copyright © 2006 LewRockwell.com [See the Fair Use Notice, below.]

posted by George Thomas Kysor 1:55 PM

Information Operations Roadmap 

Washington, D.C., January 26, 2006 - A secret Pentagon "roadmap" on war propaganda, personally approved by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in October 2003, calls for "boundaries" between information operations abroad and the news media at home, but provides for no such limits and claims that as long as the American public is not "targeted," any leakage of PSYOP to the American public does not matter. - National Security Archive (via Slashdot)

posted by George Thomas Kysor 1:36 PM

on aging........ 

---I feel like my body has gotten totally out of shape, so I got my doctor's permission to join a fitness club and start exercising. I decided to take an aerobics class for seniors. I bent, twisted, gyrated, jumped up and down, and perspired for an hour. But, by the time I got my leotards on, the class was over.

--- Just before the funeral services, the undertaker came up to the very elderly widow and asked, "How old was your husband?" "98," she replied. "Two years older than me." "So you're 96," the undertaker commented. She responded, "Hardly worth going home, is it?

--- I've sure gotten old! I've had two bypass surgeries, a hip replacement, new knees. Fought prostate cancer and diabetes. I'm half blind, can't hear anything quieter than a jet engine, take 40 different medications that make me dizzy, winded, and subject to blackouts. Have bouts with dementia. Have poor circulation; hardly feel my hands and feet anymore. Can't remember if I'm 85 or 92. Have lost all my friends. But, thank God, I still have my driver's license. (Must be a Floridian!)

--- An elderly woman decided to prepare her will and told her preacher she had two final requests. First, she wanted to be cremated, and second, she wanted her ashes scattered over Wal-Mart. "Wal-Mart?" the preacher exclaimed. "Why Wal-Mart?" "Then I'll be sure my daughters visit me twice a week".

---My memory's not as sharp as it used to be. Also, my memory's not as sharp as it used to be.

--- Know how to prevent sagging? Just eat till the wrinkles fill out.

---It's scary when you start making the same noises as your coffeemaker.

---These days about half the stuff in my shopping cart says, "For fast relief."

--- Remember: You don't stop laughing because you grow old, You grow old because you stop laughing.

THE SENILITY PRAYER : Lord, grant me the senility to forget the people I never liked anyway, the good fortune to run into the ones I do, and the eyesight to tell the difference. (via email from KS)

posted by George Thomas Kysor 1:14 PM

Sunday, April 02, 2006

Iraqi militias vs Iraqi army troops [excerpt] 

Iraqi army troops set checkpoints on the main thoroughfares in and out of Sadr City, but they are powerless in the face of the Mahdi Army. "They do nothing. They can't even stop a vehicle," says a member of a separate unit of the fractious militia as he speeds past one of the checkpoints. A pickup truck overflowing with gunmen toting AK-47s roars up from behind. Their shirts are emblazoned with the name of one of the country's most formidable armed groups: MAHDI ARMY, PROTECTION COMMITTEE, 2ND BRIGADE. As they approach the army checkpoint, no one makes a move; instead of confrontation, there is acknowledgment. A militia member waves from the pickup, and a soldier sheepishly waves back. With that, the gunmen barrel through. - Time magazine

posted by George Thomas Kysor 5:17 PM

9/11 Revisited 

Another 9/11 video, 40 minutes (via Information Clearing House)

posted by George Thomas Kysor 12:57 AM

Saturday, April 01, 2006

Men With Two Brains 

Here is a book review of no particular book but rather a class of books that has been the ruling genre in conservative nonfiction for fifty years. Actually we can include blogs in this too, since thousands upon thousands partake of the same error.
This critique applies the nearly every tract written from the Right from Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative to the latest publishing venture of the talk show media celebrity wing nut to the statement of principles of the local College Republican club.

Here is the argument, reduced form:

On domestic policy, the government is the enemy. We need to scale back government spending and regulations that tie up business in red tape. The public schools are failing and need an injection of competition. Too many welfare programs are out of control. Taxes are too high and complex. Politicians and bureaucrats shouldn't run our lives, lest liberty be lost. Let's return to our founding principles and return government to the people.

On the foreign policy, we are surrounded on all sides by enemies. Dangers lurk everywhere. We need to strike them before they strike us. We must not shirk our responsibilities to ourselves and the world. We need not fear the use of power, even war, even relentless global war. We cannot cut our defenses. Indeed, we must expand them. Our allies need us. We need not listen to the cowards who would recoil from this struggle against evil because freedom isn't free. If anything we need to beef up military spending.

Do you see the contradiction? Apparently it is not obvious to thousands of writers, activists, and thinkers, and not just today but dating back for decades. The problem is this. In the first paragraph, the government is rightly presumed to be the coercive enemy that takes from the people and saps their productivity. It cannot perform tasks as efficiently as property owners. It helps rather than hurts. Government does not know best. Our choice is government or liberty.

All that is fine as far as it goes. But when it comes to foreign policy, the analysis is entirely reversed. The presumption that the American people and the government are unified is integral to the analysis, as summed up in the plural pronouns "our" and "we," as if the people have direct control over the foreign-policy decisions of the political leadership.

Whereas the government is considered to be bubble-headed and ham-handed in domestic policy, in matters of foreign policy the government is suddenly imbued with virtuous traits such as courage. Taxes, in this case, are not a burden but the price we pay for civilization. The largest and most violent government program of all — namely war — is not an imposition with unintended consequences but an essential and praiseworthy effort at protection.

I don't mean to pick on the Right exclusively. The Left often offers the inverse of this recommendation. They believe that the government can't but unleash Hell when it is waging war and spending on military machinery. But when it comes to domestic policy, they believe the same government can cure the sick, comfort the afflicted, teach the unlearned, and bring hope and happiness to all.

Each sides presumes that it potentially enjoys full control over the government it instructs to do this thing as versus that thing. What happens in real life, of course, is that the public sector — always and everywhere seeking more power — responds to the demands of both by granting each party's positive agenda while eschewing its negative one. Thus is the Left given its welfare, and the Right given its warfare, and we end up with a state that grows ever more vast and intrusive at home and abroad.

What neither side understands is that the critique that they offer of the programs they do not like apply also to the programs they do like. The same state that robs you and me, ties business in knots, and wrecks the schools also does the same and worse to countries that the US government invades. From the point of view of the taxed, the destination of the money doesn't matter; it is all taken by coercion and all of it saps the productive capacity of society. Similarly, the state that uses military power to impose its imperial will on foreign regimes — destroying property, lives, and making endless enemies — is the one the Left proposes to put in charge of our economic lives.

It is impossible to make sense of the contradictions, particularly in the American political context, where the rise of American military power parallels the rise of big government at home. This is true from the Civil War to the present. These two parts of the state grow together. (Understand that this critique is not the usual libertarian rendering that you hear in the media that we supposedly agree with the right on economic policy and the left on social policy; there are too many problems with that apparatus to go into here, but suffice it to say that it leaves foreign policy completely out of the picture.)

Now it is perfectly true that history and present reality provide many examples of government that are invasive internally but not externally. Sweden, Canada, Italy, and a 100 other nation-states have huge welfare states but no noticeable international military presence . However: many of the world's welfare states were actually imposed by military conquest (e.g. Japan after WW2). Also, the Left would do well to observe that the best guard against a warmongering state is a state that is powerless in all aspects of life.

What makes no sense at all — conceptually, historically, or politically — is the rightwing view that the state should be expansionist and imperialist abroad but otherwise do nothing at home beyond the limits set forth in the Constitution or the political writings of the founding generation. It is undeniable that that warfare state will not restrict itself to harming and bullying foreign peoples. It always and everywhere does the same to the domestic population. It occupies us, attacks our property, ferrets out political enemies, and wages low-intensity warfare against us.

The suggestion of conservatives that the government engage in all-out war on the world but otherwise leave people free to manage their own affairs is completely absurd in every way. It is akin to the demand that one's left leg march in one direction and the right leg march in the other direction. If we know how the human body works, we know that this suggestion is ridiculous. So too, if we know how government works, we know that a state that is expansionist abroad will never let well enough alone at home.

Back to the leg analogy. The person who is told to march in two separate directions faces a dilemma. He cannot do both at once so he must evaluate the priorities of the instructor. He must discern what is the most important course. For American conservatives, this choice is obviously clear: so important is their foreign-policy agenda to their overall worldview that they are willing to live with Leviathan at home for the duration.

One way we can discern this is the utterly non-negotiability of the interventionist position. That the United States must wage war is surely the one point that unites the American Right. To be sure, it wasn't always so: before the early 1950s and immediately after the end of the Cold War, some intellectuals on the Right began to see that empire and liberty are incompatible.

But these were brief periods. For the most part, the political tracts of today live with the same contradictions that stained them in the 1980s and before. All the neconservatives contributed in the 1970s and 1980s was an embrace of the welfare state that had been previously rejected on the right; otherwise their foreign policy position was largely the same as that pushed by the National Review crowd since the 1950s. What's more, the end of the Cold War changed nothing.

Whereas the fear of Communism was the great reason for expansionism and the delay of liberty back then, now there is a new enemy — radical Islam and its terrorism — that must be beaten into submission.
In all this, conservatives are men with two brains. One sees the government as a menace, something stupid, inefficient, brutal, isolated from real life, and the enemy of liberty. The other sees government as a smart, wise, and all-knowing, a friend to all, in touch with life around the planet, and the friend to liberty everywhere. How these two brains are integrated is never explained. But the truth is that Jeffersonian-Misesian-Hayekian-Rothbardian critique of the state applies in both cases. You either embrace it or you don't. As Harry Browne said: "The government that's strong enough to give you what you want is strong enough to destroy you."

In this sense, President Bush at least has consistency on his side. He has expanded both the domestic and international Leviathan more substantially than any president since Lyndon Johnson, who was also consistent in this respect. Their love of the state began differently, but it has ended in the same support of the welfare-warfare state. It is those who would keep the foreign-policy circuses but decry the domestic-policy bread who need to have their heads examined. - Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

posted by George Thomas Kysor 4:34 PM

Rate My Kitten [Click here.] 

Sooks is just one of a vast, uncounted collection of rated felines. Enjoy! (via slashy)

posted by George Thomas Kysor 3:01 PM

OMG!!! Ponies!!! 

Meg (via Slashdottie)

posted by George Thomas Kysor 2:38 PM

Wrong Address 

A lesson to be learned from one typing the wrong e-mail address!

A Minneapolis couple decided to go to Florida to thaw out during a particularly icy winter. They planned to stay at the same hotel where they spent their honeymoon 20 years earlier. Because of hectic schedules, it was difficult to coordinate their travel schedules. So, the husband left Minnesota and flew to Florida on Thursday, with his wife flying down the following day. The husband checked into the hotel.

There was a computer in his room, so he decided to send an email to his wife. However, he accidentally left out one letter in her email
address, and without realizing his error, sent the email.

Meanwhile, somewhere in Houston , a widow had just returned home from her husband's funeral. He was a minister who was called home to glory following a heart attack. The widow decided to check her email expecting messages from relatives and friends. After reading the first message, she screamed and fainted. The widow's son rushed into the room, found his mother on the floor, and saw the computer screen which read:

To: My Loving Wife
Subject: I've Arrived
Date: October 16, 2004

I know you're surprised to hear from me. They have computers here now and you are allowed to send emails to your loved ones. I've just arrived and have been checked in. I see that everything has been prepared for your arrival tomorrow. Looking forward to seeing you then! Hope your journey is as uneventful as mine was.

P.S. Sure is freaking hot down here - (via email from HLJ)

posted by George Thomas Kysor 11:45 AM

Vitamin E 

The March 2006 issue of the Journal of Gerontology, Series A reported the finding of researchers at the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and scientists in Italy that having a higher plasma level of vitamin E is associated with a reduced risk of frailty in men and women sixty-five years of age and older. - Life Extension Newsletter Copyright © 1995-2006 Life Extension Foundation [See the Fair Use Notice, below.]

posted by George Thomas Kysor 12:14 AM